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I performed istikhara with isha tonight. I’ve been meaning to do it for days and weeks now but I’ve been avoiding it. I think I wasn’t ready to really know what to do. I don’t think I was really ready to step forwards and know how to proceed. I didn’t want to perform the istikhara because I was scared.
For those of you who don’t know the istikhara is a prayer of guidance. It’s a prayer where you have a decision to make and you leave the path you take to Allah. You ask Allah to give you knowledge and power as it all comes from Him. You ask Allah to help make your path easy if it is righteous in the name of Islam, your personal well-being, and the best for your afterlife. You ask Allah to take you away from that path if it is damaging for your faith, your well-being, and your afterlife. Instructions on how to perform it are here.
I asked Allah to make my decision to go home, to England, for the best. I asked Allah to make leaving Saudi for the best. I asked Allah to realise if it’s the best decision for me to go home on March first. Alhamdulilah, as soon as I completed the prayer a wave of euphoria ran through me. I got a rush of warmth surge through me. It felt right. I have faith in Allah. I know now that going home will be for the best. All doubts have been removed.
Tomorrow I’ll pray istikhara again. The istikhara for tomorrow is going to be even bigger than the one I performed today. The istikhara tomorrow will shape the path the rest of my life takes.
— Jim Morrison
Before I came to Saudi for the first time I thought that my relationship with my closest friends was going to strain. They were all doing their own things and I was going on to be on the other side of the world and totally out of the loop with everything that was going on with them at home. That fear was realised to a fairly deep extent when, over the course of my first stint in Saudi, I hardly talked to them. It was as though a slow wedge had crept in between us and as time went on it drove us a little bit further away from each other. When I went home in July this was definitely seen in person. I didn’t spent anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to have with my closest friends and I didn’t even SEE some of them. I wasn’t good enough at all and I felt so guilty.
I miss London. I lived there for a year but it’s a place where some of the people who mean the most to me in this world live and it’s been in my thoughts a lot these last couple of days. For those of you who don’t know (have you been living under a rock?) there have been riots ongoing for the last few days in the English capital and the city has been burning. People have died, millions of pounds of damage has been caused, and law and order have vanished. Chaos reigns.
This is such a good question to ask. It’s impossible for humans to not make mistakes. We’re not perfect beings and we falter or misstep or don’t give something as much as we should. The questions we then ask what we do to avoid mistakes and what we do after we make a mistake. I think both are crucial in understanding how our fear links to mistaking making in the first place
There always comes a moment when you realise you’ve been thinking about something way too much, that you’ve calculated all the odds, that you’ve crunched all the numbers, and you know you have to do. At that point you take the leap. The question that most of us ask is when does that moment actually come about? I can only talk about this question from personal experience.
Candles in a church in Brussels.
Isn’t it amazing how each candle represents the prayers of a person. It could be there as a way of the person asking God for help, for an opportunity, to ease their fears, or just for strength and hope in the darkness.
There’s a kind of beauty to the sea of flickering light with such depth attached to it.
The path my life has taken has meandered a whole lot over the last decade and a bit. At times I’ve thought a certain plan or path would follow through and, instead, something very different happened instead. There have been numerous instances of this occurring that I can tell you about. Some of these things might have been the greatest fears of others but whether it was my greatest fear, I don’t know.
It’s amazing how other people have the ability to influence your emotions so much. People can make you feel happy and those very same people can do things that turn it all around and make you feel like shit. Sometimes you respond with joy but at other times you can only respond with anger.
I saw the news yesterday and it discombobulated me! I was astounded by what I was seeing. Synthia is an organism(?) that needs food to ‘live’ and reproduces copies of itself over and over. The slight difference between this organism and the trillions that have come before it on earth is that Synthia’s evolutionary ancestor is an iPad! Synthia’s start has more in common with a toaster than it does with you and me. The questions this ‘creation’ poses are crazily wide reaching. It links everything from scientific marvels, to theology, to terrorism and warfare.
It’s not long to go now before the first stage of my goodbye to Blighty starts. In just over a week I’ll be on a plane to Prague about to start a TEFL course. This moment has been a long time coming. With there being so little time left there are so many conflicting emotions I’m feeling.
