Revatinandana: One day had been especially difficult for me. I had been on the street collecting for a long time, I was tired, and I had just fought with another devotee. I felt that I couldn’t go on, that it was time for me to disappear and leave.
That night, after another eight-hour day of street sankirtan and magazine selling, we were driven over to the bungalow where Prabhupada was speaking. I didn’t get into chanting during the first kirtan because I didn’t want to get carried away again.
Every time I felt like leaving, it was either one of Prabhupada’s lectures or a feast that would wind up changing my mind to stay. Maya was really tugging at me.
When Srila Prabhupada started to lecture that night, I had my head down. Prabhupada said, “When one is engaged in devotional service he will become joyful. If one is morose, that means he is not Krishna conscious. If one is Krishna conscious, he cannot be morose.”
That hit me hard. I looked at him, and his eyes were right on me. He was speaking to me at that moment, but I was so psychologically fragile, if he had singled me out I would have probably run from the room or broken into tears or gotten very agitated, even angry, and left.
Instead he did it in a lecture. I knew that he had seen exactly what I was feeling, and he said it for me. And I knew he was right, because all day I had refused to engage myself and, therefore I had been miserable.
My legs hurt, I was tired, I was this, and I was that. Otherwise, I would have been absorbed, time would have passed, and little by little I would be getting stronger. Periodically other devotees had experiences similar to mine.
Prabhupada was very good at reading faces. He once said that the face was the index of the mind, and he had that art down by training or intuition or both. He knew what to say at a particular time to keep us from faltering or to encourage us in different ways.