Cannot You Serve Him Once?

*A retelling based on **Portals to Freedom** by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937), chapter 6. The account is one Lua Getsinger told, and Ives records it. The lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the book.*

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Lua Getsinger was one of the first American believers. In the early days of the Faith in America she made the pilgrimage to the prison city of 'Akká to see 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

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One day, while she was with Him, He told her that He was too busy that day to call on a friend of His who was very ill and poor, and He wished her to go in His place, to take him food and care for him as He had been doing. He told her where the man could be found, and she went gladly, proud that He should trust her with the errand.

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She came back quickly. "Master," she exclaimed, "surely you cannot realize to what a terrible place you sent me. I almost fainted from the awful stench, the filthy rooms, the degrading condition of that man and his house. I fled lest I contract some terrible disease."

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Ives writes that 'Abdu'l-Bahá regarded her "sadly and sternly." Then He said:

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> Dost thou desire to serve God, serve thy fellow man for in him dost thou see the image and likeness of God.

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He told her to go back to the man's house. If it was filthy, she should clean it; if this brother of hers was dirty, she should bathe him; if he was hungry, she should feed him. She was not to return until this was done. Many times, He told her, He had done this for the man. Could she not serve him once?

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Ives tells this story in his account of the evening of May 19, 1912, when 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke on brotherhood at Ives's Brotherhood Church in Jersey City. Lua Getsinger sat in the audience that night, and writing of it years later, Ives recalled the story she had told. "This was He," he wrote, "who was speaking in my Church of Brotherhood."

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*A retelling based on **Portals to Freedom** (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937), chapter 6. For Ives's own telling, see the [full text](https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom).*

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