Finding Your Purpose Through Faith in Action

“All over the world one hears beautiful sayings extolled and noble precepts admired,” said Abdu’l-Baha, the authorized interpreter of the Baha’i writings and the son of Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith. 

All men say they love what is good, and hate everything that is evil! Sincerity is to be admired, whilst lying is despicable. Faith is a virtue, and treachery is a disgrace to humanity. It is a blessed thing to gladden the hearts of men, and wrong to be the cause of pain. To be kind and merciful is right, while to hate is sinful. Justice is a noble quality and injustice an iniquity.

...But all these sayings are but words and we see very few of them carried into the world of action.

That’s why the Baha’i writings ask us to “Let deeds, not words, be your adorning,” because what good is it to believe in a noble, world-embracing vision if we don’t actively work to make that vision a reality?

Kim Wu, a Los Angeles-based Baha’i who learned about the Baha’i Faith from a friend in college, says she “felt particularly drawn to not only that vision, but also the action behind what people were saying. They weren’t just coming into spaces or saying to each other, ‘We believe these things,’” but they were also “really steadfast and clear that ‘not only do we believe what we believe, but we live what we believe.’”

In this video for the Race Unity Project, Kim reflects on how comforting and empowering it was to learn about the Baha’i Faith at a time when she was trying to understand what her purpose in life was.

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Produced by Journalism for Change, Inc, a nonprofit media organization founded by filmmaker and human rights activist Maziar Bahari, “The Race Unity Project” tells “the century-long story of the American Baha’i community and its efforts — as well as its tests and challenges — in promoting race unity.” Videos from “The Race Unity Project” include interviews with Baha’is about various topics — including stories of people finding a loving home in the Baha’i community and reflections on how a Baha’i-inspired mentoring program is empowering adolescents.

Watch as Kim also shares how meaningful it was for her to learn about the Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program — a Baha’i-inspired mentoring program for 12 to 15-year-olds that aims to develop young people’s capacities to serve their communities.

She says, “I had been doing a lot of youth work in that time whether it was supporting young people academically or through job mentorship, etc. But then it was really through the junior youth group that I felt like not only were we co-creating a space with the young people themselves, but then we’re also making an effort to build a community. This was truly an effort where we wanted to get to know the young people who were in our neighborhood in our community and bring our friends together.”