The Victories Won Through the Friends

Leroy Ioas, who assisted the Guardian in Haifa, told this story in a talk in Johannesburg in October 1958:

The Guardian came over one evening. He was very happy and very enthused. He said, “We have some wonderful cables today.” So he read this cable, and it was from one of the islands in the Pacific. The pioneer who had been there had been very discouraged. So every time he had written to the Guardian that he wanted to leave. He couldn’t get a job, it was hard to make any contacts, it was hard to make an impression on anyone, no one would listen to him, he was oppressed, he was opposed by the clergy, he was oppressed by the government, and everything was against him. And each time that he wrote these letters, the Guardian would tell me to write him, to encourage him, and to tell him that the Guardian wanted him to stay, and that the Guardian promised him that the seeds he was sowing would grow. Well, these cables had been received, and he now not only had one spiritual assembly, but he had two spiritual assemblies. He just burst right out like that. And I said, “Well, Shoghi Effendi, I said, of course this pioneer, he did the work, but it’s the Guardian that actually won this victory. You’re the one that won it, because if it hadn’t been for you, he’d have left.” He said, “That’s right. Leroy, I tell you, I have to stay in the Holy Land. This is my seat of operation. The friends must do the work. And I tell you that if the friends would do what I had told them to do, and if they would follow my instructions, they would be amazed at the victories which I will win through them.”

This is the most important message I give to you. Shoghi Effendi said that if the friends would do what he has told them to do, if they will consecrate their lives to the Cause, if they will turn their lives over to the Cause, if they will serve the Cause diligently in the way which he has told them to serve, they will be amazed at the victories that they will win, that I will win through them, and it is particularly appropriate, and the way he mentioned it to tell the friends, and it seems to me to be particularly appropriate at this moment, when the spirit is released and it can now operate much more effectively through us than it could before.

Source: Hand of the Cause of God Leroy Ioas, talk in Johannesburg, South Africa, 31 October 1958, transcribed from the recording In the Days of the Guardian (US Bahá’í Publishing Trust); transcript on bahai.works.

Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: pioneering).

Various. *bahaistories.com archive*. https://bahaistories.com/subject/pioneering