Ramadan Mubarak

Day 1

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, The Merciful

As Salaam Alaikum!

“Do you enjoin men to be good and neglect your own souls while you read the Book? Have you then no sense?”

Holy Quran 2:44

This particular scripture stuck out to me in today’s reading… I think its because it warns against hypocrisy while showing us what is best for us.  Its easy to point out what others are doing wrong and talk about how people should pray, eat right, live right…whatever soap box sermon we’re on for the day…but what about how I’m living my own life?  Am I out trying to change the world and neglecting to change me?

It’s interesting to me that this is in day one as well, because we are all “read(ing) the Book”… I want to have “sense”….I don’t want to neglect my own soul…The bible says it like this, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Matthew 16:26 and Mark 8:36

So, this Ramadan I’m going to strive, by God’s permission, to focus the magnifying glass on myself and as Surah 2:67 says, “seek refuge with Allah from being on of the ignorant.”

Do Creative Work – from Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin

Do Creative Work
Did you know that working with your hands, crating thing of beauty and worth, builds inner happiness? Don’t think you lack this power within you. Boris Bali, former Dean of Fine Arts, Temple University, said, “I am convinced that every human being possesses a creative urge to make beautiful things, that this urge can be brought out and put to work with proper encouragement, and that suppression of its results in maladjustment.” A routine therapy used in mental hospitals has been to give the patients creative things to do with their hands.

You can be creative in things you do at home, such as cooking, sewing, decorating, and gardening. It is not creative to merely copy someone else’s idea from a pattern, recipe, or picture — another person’s creation. Creative opportunities are found in the fields of art, sculpture, music, writing, designing, problem-solving, and almost every endeavor. You are creative when you have an original idea or produce something from your imagination, something that is good or beautiful.

And when you create something of real worth or supreme beauty, such as rare treasure of art, music, or literature, it goes beyond inner happiness to deep soul satisfaction. When we consider the great joy in the modest creative efforts of man, think how God must have felt when He created the earth and, viewing the workmanship of His hands, said, “It is good.”