Let’s try this one last door
Looking ahead at the goals for the year, overall, we realized that we should get started with sets right away. The moment we set the goals, we realized that we needed to do at least seven sets each weekend, including that coming Saturday. Realizing that it is a very difficult goal (sankalpa), we prayed to Lord Chaitanya to send sincere souls.
One devotee was helping us to load books in our car, and he said, "My wife is reading Sri Chaitanya-caritamrta every day until Gaura Purnima, but I don't have a set at home. Can I take one set?"
He took a set, and I was encouraged by this sign from Krsna.
We went knocking on doors in an apartment building, where we met a lot of people who just moved to America from India. They were struggling hard to make enough money to meet the cost of living in the Bay Area. Most of them were pious, but could not come up with enough laxmi to pay for the set. I felt deep pain in my heart to see how everyone was working hard to make a better living, but could not afford a set for spirituality. We gave them Krishna books instead, as most of them already had the Bhagavad-gita.
After a couple of hours we had yet to meet people who would be interested in sets.
Then Sankirtana Prabhu said, “Let's try this one last door.”
We were greeted by a wonderful couple from Tirupati. They had just finished an eight-week course on meditation, and they were looking for spiritual knowledge. We presented the CC set and gave a brief description of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. They happily took the set, and they wanted to introduce us to their neighbors.
Their neighbors were Sraddha Mataji and Mukharavinda Prabhu's friends, and they also took a set. They introduced us to their neighbors and so on. They all were very sincere and pious. It felt that Lord Chaitanya put all of them together in a single block to take CC sets.
Since we wanted to give everyone the mercy of Sri Chaitanya, we did not show Srimad Bhagavatam first. One gentleman from South India was attached to Sanskrit and despite our attempts to show Sri Chaitanya Caritamrta, he was not satisfied. So we had to show him Srimad Bhagavatam. He was very satisfied after that and took a SB set.
We also met another person who went to a Vedic school until the twelfth grade and after that lost touch with Vedic literature. He was just thinking that he needed to reconnect with those texts, and he met us devotees. He had so much of respect for this rare literature and took a Srimad Bhagavatam set.
By the mercy and arrangement of Krsna, somehow we were able to distribute five Chaitanya Caritamrta sets and two Bhagavatam sets. The kids team distributed two more sets, which made it to our goal for the day: seven sets.
