143. Youth Conference in the United Kingdom

143

Youth Conference in the United Kingdom

1 January 2010

To the Friends Gathered at the Youth Conference in the United Kingdom

143.1 We have watched with admiration the eagerness with which the youth in the United Kingdom have stepped into the vanguard of the work of the Cause, reaching out to ever greater numbers of souls and engaging them in the community-building activities that lie at the heart of the Five Year Plan. Your earnestness, your energy, your intrepid determination not to shirk the demands of this Day mark you out for this all-important undertaking. Ably trained, spiritually enkindled, and eager for experience, you have arisen to seize the initiative in your immediate surroundings and beyond. The need for you to apply yourselves to service in two capacities in particular—as teachers of children’s classes and as animators of junior youth groups—has never been more apparent. Countless parents yearn for the means of developing their children’s spiritual faculties that would lay within them the foundations of a principled and upright character. And surely every young person will flourish in a programme that helps to form a strong moral identity in the critical years of early adolescence and empowers participants to contribute to the well-being of society. Beyond these specific fields of activity, you must not refrain from acquainting your peers with the potent, the compelling, the world-embracing mission with which you are charged. Which of them would not feel their spirits enriched for contemplating how, through the application of those far-reaching principles enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh, the regeneration of the world can be accomplished and its perplexing crises resolved? Which of them would not be raised to a new consciousness of humanity’s capacity to “carry forward an ever-advancing civilization” by combining their energies with yours and bending them towards this noble aim?

143.2 That the spirit of this gathering may galvanize your energies and strengthen your resolve; that you may pledge to intensify your efforts in the path of service to humankind; above all, that you may be the recipients of an outpouring of the favours vouchsafed by the Blessed Beauty to those who arise for His Cause—these are our ardent supplications at the Sacred Threshold.

With loving Bahá’í greetings,

The Universal House of Justice