On faith

Yesterday I wrote about finding comfort, but I didn’t speak about faith, which I think is deserving of an entire post all it’s own.

Although I was born into a Muslim family, I spent most of my life being more or less secular, I did what I thought was the basics but I didn’t really know much about my religion. At 19, when I started to explain it to my husband, I sort of understood more about it and we both found a love for the utter simplicity and fairness that is now unfortunately seldom ever associated with Islam.

My faith has been a really big part of me since then, but my life remained pretty much unchanged, until about 6 years ago, when, because of whatever reasons I made a conscious effort to look for something more, a sense of purpose, if you will.

There have been a number of occasions when I’ve said that my life has not been the way I anticipated, and no matter how many times I say it, it still remains a huge understatement, because in so many ways I have always felt like my life just happened and I had very little control over it.

When I got married at 20, neither of us really knew what we were getting into, and we both share the feeling that we were somehow meant to be together, given the very bizarre set of circumstances under which we met and became friends. I say that our life together has been filled with challenges, and it most certainly has, so much so that sometimes I am amazed that we have managed to get through it all, but, at the same, sometimes I am not amazed, because of my faith, I now see life as a journey, as a path, and I’ve learnt to live without regret, without the woulda’s and the shoulda’s, and I just believe that things will be as they are meant to be.

My faith has been an immense source of comfort for me, when life makes absolutely no sense, I can hold on to it and be guaranteed that the confusion will pass. It is for certain the only way that I ever feel real peace… “Surely in the remembrance of God do hearts find rest” [Qur’an, 13.28]