Confirmation

It often amazes me, the forms that God’s confirmations can take. How something can go wrong and through it, wonderful and amazing things can go right. How you can be thinking or worrying about something and then something will happen or someone will say something that pulls everything together. I was guiding at the shrine tonight and a friend came, and as she left I had this urge deep in my heart to beg her for a hug. Here sometimes I yearn so deeply for hugs, but I often don’t feel comfortable asking for them for some reason. And so I watched her leave, wishing I’d said something. Literally maybe a minute and a half later a lady walked past me, and then turned around and asked me if she could give me a hug. I was so startled, but I gave her a warm hug and then she went into the shrine and I started nearly crying feeling as if ‘Abdu'l-Bahá had seen what was in my heart and answered my prayers, prayers that I hadn’t even really said yet. I was standing there still in shock, awe, ecstasy, whatever you want to call it, for maybe ten minutes when another lady came out of the shrine, walked up to me and gave me a warm beautiful hug, then touched her cheeks to my cheeks three times, held my arms for a minute, smiled at me and walked away. Then at the end of the night after I had stayed about thirty minutes longer than I had thought I was supposed to, but hadn’t been bothered at all by it, the lady who came to relieve me, who I don’t think I had ever met before, gave me the warmest smile and a huge hug. I can’t even explain how much deeper my love for ‘Abdu'l-Bahá is now, Whose shrine I was standing outside of when all of this happened, Whose confirmations bring tears to my eyes, Whose love I could never live without. Interestingly enough, I have been realizing recently that if I really wish to cultivate in the children in my children’s class a deep love for ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, that I need to do the same. And I spent a lot of this week praying to ‘Abdu'l-Bahá to help me to do exactly this. Thus not only was this a small confirmation of the fact that He can see what is deep inside our hearts and loves us and will always provide what we need, but it was also a huge confirmation at the same time, that hopefully I am heading in the right direction, that little-by-little, day-by-day I am strengthening the love I have for ‘Abdu'l-Bahá. What a wonderful confirmation to have been given.