After a recent spiritual faceplant, for a while I felt ashamed to be calling myself a Bahá’í after such a failure. And it’s not as if I haven’t been given time to learn.
But then I remembered that a common metaphor for the Manifestation is that of a physician:
Every divine Manifestation is the very life of the world, and the skilled physician of each ailing soul. (Abdu’l-Bahá)
And you see the same metaphor in the gospels, where Christ is walking along and all the sick people suddenly get up and follow Him.
When I was a new Bahá’í many of us referred to ourselves as “children of the half-light”, i.e. we of this generation could never fully shake our origins.
But the goal for now is to keep on trying:
Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday.
— Bahá’u’lláh