You can’t feel the precision of mind
bahaistories.com archive · Read original
When in Bahá'í history

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 defuse 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: In the Days of the Guardian a Talk by Hand of the Cause of God Leroy Ioas in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1958
Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: efficiency).
Cite this story
Various. *bahaistories.com archive*. https://bahaistories.com/subject/efficiency
Record yourself reading this story
Recording stays on this device only. Nothing is uploaded.
Related stories
Another time he came over for dinner and he was rather disturbed
Another time he came over for dinner and he was rather disturbed. He had some cables from America about certain matters, and some actions had been taken, and he was a little disturbed at the actions which were taken, actually, and he…
Meeting Shoghi Effendi in Paris during the Summer of 1920
In the ‘Priceless Pearl’ Ruhiyyih Khanum tells us how in 1920 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent Shoghi Effendi abroad for his studies, in the company of Lotfullah Hakim who was returning to England after his first…
I remember the Guardian telling me of how (I believe it must have been in early
I remember the Guardian telling me of how (I believe it must have been in early 1920) one of the old American Baháis had sent a gift to the Master of a Cunningham automobile; notice of its arrival at the quayside in port came just as the…
It seems almost inconceivable that Mr
It seems almost inconceivable that Mr. Ioas could render any more extraordinary services, but he did. There was one service that meant more than any other, to Shoghi Effendi. An apartment building in which the Covenant-breakers lived,…