The Guardian's Precision of Mind

In a talk given in Johannesburg in 1958, Hand of the Cause Leroy Ioas spoke of Shoghi Effendi:

You can’t feel the precision of mind. I’ve dealt in America with high executives all of my business life. Men who have a problem, and they size it up, and they see the meat and heart of it and seize the situation immediately, but they pale along the side of Shoghi Effendi. Even those long letters from various parts of the world and they [diffuse] their love for the Guardian, their devotion for the Guardian, what they would do to serve the Guardian, and then two or three pages of questions, and he would read them and say, “But why don’t they just tell me what they want to know? They keep talking around the subject instead of the heart.” He said, “I don’t have time to read all of these pages. Now why don’t you correspond and find out exactly what the question is, and then give it to me and I’ll give them the answer.” Mind of precision you never saw! He was small in stature, he was tender, he was kind, he was loving, but I tell you the precise mind! And how he suffered from the inefficiencies of the Bahá’ís. He used to get letters from other people and national assemblies, mountains, and oceans and oceans of devotion, but mountains of inefficiency. Everything he did was efficient. Everything he did had to have a result immediately. And when I was there, we started to talk to him about this, and he answered many questions. There wasn’t any need to go into all of the details. “Well, I went to Jerusalem, and I told Mr. Smith, and I talked with him,…” and he would say, “No, no, Mr. Smith said so-and-so in Jerusalem, and that’s all the things that should be answered.” He wasn’t interested in details. He was only interested in the heart of every subject, and it was in the heart that he gave his answer, and gave it immediately. And if the heart wasn’t there, he recognized it.

Source: Leroy Ioas, "In the Days of the Guardian", talk given in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1958 (transcript at bahai-library.com/ioas_days_guardian).

Collected from bahaistories.com.

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