The Strength That Came from Elsewhere

A retelling based on Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937). The narrative is retold in our own words; the short phrase in quotation marks is verbatim from the book. Read the full text for Ives's own telling.

'Abdu'l-Bahá was nearing seventy when He travelled across America, and He spent Himself without stint. He had passed some forty years a prisoner; the long days of speaking, receiving, and pouring out love upon everyone who came to Him would have worn down a person half His age.

One night Howard Colby Ives saw what it cost.

The day had been a long one — talk after talk, crowd after crowd — and as the automobile carried 'Abdu'l-Bahá home through the late hours, Ives watched Him sink into a weariness so complete it frightened him. The Master seemed almost beyond reach, His strength utterly gone. When they arrived, He had to be all but carried inside, His body seemingly with nothing left to give.

Ives must have thought the day was over, the well run dry.

But within fifteen minutes, from the top of the stairs, 'Abdu'l-Bahá's voice came ringing down through the house — and it carried, Ives wrote, even more than its usual energy and power. The weariness had simply lifted. There He was again: the dominant, smiling, forceful presence the friends knew, as though the exhausted figure in the car had been someone else entirely.

Ives never forgot it, because he understood what he had glimpsed. The strength 'Abdu'l-Bahá lived on was not the ordinary kind that runs out when the body tires. It was drawn from a deeper source — a spirit so turned toward God and so given over to the service of others that it could be poured out to the last drop and then, quietly, filled again. He did not serve from His own reserves of energy. He served from a wellspring that never failed, and that is why, to those who watched Him, He seemed tireless even at the edge of exhaustion: a living sign of the power that sustains all who give themselves wholly to God.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted phrase is verbatim from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937). See the source for Ives's complete telling.

Ives, H. C.. (1937). *Portals to Freedom*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom