I hope you have had some good and joyous holy days during Christmas. I also hope that the New Year will bring godly blessings to all of you.Thank you for having kept me company for so long.Hopefully you will stay here with me.
I have spent some days of rest ,reading and writing, studying and my mind is at ease. Soon my tummy will also feel very good, my daughter is soon serving a tasty dish called Johanssons frestelse, an ovenbaked potatodish - in English "J:s temptation". We will also have a Finnish caulibeet-dish. Caulidishes are many on the Swedish and the Finnish "Christmas table. Red green and brown ones. Turkey is a stranger here. We eat ham.
The Bahais do not reject the Christmas holy days and the traditions. We share the joys of Christmas together with our families and other friends.We are not rigid in any way.And I bet that the former Buddhists ,Jews or whoever who have become Bahais do not go into seclusion during their older traditional festvities respectively. On top of that we have our own ones which are 9, including the birthday of Bahaullah.
Today I will give you some few Bahai-words which I have to retranslate from Swedish ,sitting at my daughters PC while the potato"gratin" is baked.
So there might be some linguistical mistakes., which I apologize for.
The words are directed to the ones who have turned to Bahaullah telling us what to do as His servants.It applies to anybody who have turned to God with a heart inflamed with the love of God.
"O servants of God! Rejoice through Gods Message of joy, be happy through the breeze from God\s fragrance and hold on to the Kingdom of God in such wise that it makes you detached from the world and kindles in thy heart the love of God so that whomsoever approaches you will feel its warmth;...Abdu'l-Bahá
Abdu'l-Bahá expects that He may see us,"shining like a candle and burn like the nightly butterfly with the fire of God\s love, to cry like the cloud through the grandeur of love and attraction, to smile like the meadow and be set in motion of joy like the young tree that is touched by the breeze from the Abhá Paradise".
When Gods Messenger comes to us approximately every thousand year we are blessed with the previlege to do things , new wonderful things for God, to help His eternal Cause through a fresh outpouring of the divine Spirit. God is of course quite able to perform or execute whatever He thinks is best for all humanity through one single Word of His, but the spreading of the new Glad Tidings from heaven has been entrusted to His servants, through speech and words and this is out of Gods benevolence and generosity and constitutes the greatest good for them.
Why then hesitate?. Why not seize the opportunity to help His Cause, which will rescue us from the ills of a crumbling civilisation , this world, steeped in superstition, poverty and bad governing.
"Soon will all that dwell on earth be enlisted under this banner" Bahaullah
We must not look at our shortcomings, they are there as always, we are not perfect any of us, so we must look at Bahaullahs love, His generosity and grace, His forgiving us a hundredfold if we only try , -if we just take one little step He will take a thousand steps for us. This is the way of God.That is the power of faith.
And all are welcome.
With all my heart! I wish you
Happy New Year and a new fresh beginning
Laila in Gothenburg