Family Devotions in Indy Offer Relief to Others

A monthly devotional has assisted our family to turn toward God. It has been a pivot toward the light just at the moment we needed it, to protect us from being engulfed in darkness. I can’t say enough about the accompaniment of the Bahá’ís and seekers who attended.

Over the years, maybe four, the devotional has provided an ever-present framework by which I, and we, could peek out and try to put into practice the lofty views of our noble potential found in the Bahá’í Writings . The gatherings were monthly as a result of consultation in our marriage. That is why they have endured over at least four years. They were sometimes song, sometimes drumming or instrumental, planned or unplanned. When we lost our Junior Youth Group, and later our children’s class, the monthly devotions provided a foundation for our neighborhood consultation and neighborhood goals at cluster reflection meetings.

Having a devotional with a set time and place allowed us to aspire to teaching, because we could invite friends and neighbors, which we did, inconsistently. However badly we did his, the potential still remains to build and strengthen friendships in our neighborhood, a perspective my husband noted. Our daughter often took advantage of the devotional to strengthen bonds with us, other Bahá’ís, and to invite and teach others. Prayers were often a half hour and socializing an hour and a half. When we had someone new to the Bahá’í Faith, we transformed the social time to a fireside.

COVID has taken away the refreshments but provided an opportunity for education and sharing with Zoom, the technological means by which we could keep this spiritual bounty in our lives. Potential still exists to invite family, Christians, and those of other religions with selections on a specific virtue each time. A present challenge is creating both a digital and a hard-copy (business-card sized) invitation, which presents accurate, ongoing links, phone numbers, meeting IDs, and passcodes by which we can offer ever more widely the life-giving waters of the Word of God to a parched and dying humanity.

Beverly
Indianapolis, Indiana