Maryam Amir – Hope in devastation

This brother shares that he was stuck under the rubble for four

days, but it felt like four hours for him. He said that he was

dreaming of eating and being so full. And he says that you hear

narratives of children who say that someone was visiting them,

someone who was wearing white and feeding them. A Turkish sister

shared that there was a mother who was frantically trying to get

crews to help take her children out of the rubble. And

Alhamdulillah, they finally did, and the children came out safely.

And then they couldn't find the woman anywhere, and so they asked

the 13 year old boy, Where is your mom? And the boy looked at him and

said that his mother had passed four years ago. There are

incredible stories of hope that come out in this immense

devastation, but there are also so many questions like, why did it

happen in the first place? And what about all the people who are

still stuck and who who had it made it out? Omaru, Lila Juan, who

he used to pray for martyrdom in Medina. And people would say, how

are you going to be a martyr in Medina? Medina is like such a safe

place as wars don't happen in Medina. And yet, he was stabbed in

his prayer. He died from that wound, and Inshallah, he was

considered a martyr. So many of you pray to be martyrs, knowing

that you're not going to be on a battlefield, but you make that

anyway. You ask that you be counted as a martyr anyway. And

right now, one of the one of the ways that people are considered a

martyr is when they die through a building collapsing on them.

I don't know if there were people who used to pray that they'd be

martyrs, and they couldn't have imagined that they actually would

be considered sha Allah, the people of the highest paradise.

There's a narrative in the Crusades through Arab eyes of a

school teacher who was in Syria. He stepped out of the classroom

because he really had to use the restroom, and in that time period,

there was a huge earthquake. By the time he was able to come back

to his students, all of them had passed away. There was complete

rubble. And he sat on the rubble and he wondered, how is he going

to break the news to the parents of all of these kids, only to find

later that all of the parents had died in the same earthquake. We

don't know their names today. We literally have no clue who they

are. Most of us probably didn't know there was a huge earthquake

at that time, but their names have never been forgotten. With the one

who is in the heavens, their status is one that we can only

imagine, even though, centuries later, no one knows who they were,

all of us know we have limited time here on Earth. It's

incredibly sobering. And when a disaster of this magnitude takes

place. Sometimes we question, why? What is our role? Why do these

things happen? And I know that some of you have asked about your

own faith, and if you're struggling with your faith right

now, I am sitting with you in that process, and I'm holding space for

you. But sometimes the people there are the ones whose faith are

the strongest. A man under the rubble asked for water to make

Waldo, a grandmother who was saved, refused to come out until

she had a hijab that they gave her. What's helped me is knowing

who Allah is, knowing the reality of who he is, can help us process

and allow us to see beyond ourselves and ask how we can help.