Love from Mecca to Medina

I decided I liked people who cried spontaneously. It showed they had hearts they hadn’t buried too deeply inside.

Everyone is important. When you know that and believe it and act upon it, everything and everyone around you will feel at peace with you.

What's only between you and Allah is the most important thing of all to pay attention to-nothing else comes close to it. Because while everything has rights over you in Islam, your soul, the part of you no one knows, has the greatest right of all, because it's the part of us directly connected to the Greatest of all.

You're not tasked with the outcome. That's in Allah's hands. Yours is the effort.

With hardship will come ease. With hardship will come ease. With hardship will come ease.

No leaf falls without His knowledge, nor is there a single grain in the darkness of the earth, or anything, fresh or withered, that is not written in a clear record.

Allah looks at our intentions and efforts, so start from a good place and just try your honest best.

And proclaim unto all people the pilgrimage; they will come on foot and on every [kind of] fast mount, coming from every far-away point [on earth], so that they might experience much that shall be of benefit to them…. —Surah 22:27–28

So he would get away from it all and sit in the cave to grieve and pray for change-yes, in the best ways he knew how. And then

change came via an injunction from an angel-"Iqra!" —telling him to do something he could not actually do: read. I remember when

And it is He who has set up the stars so that you might be guided by them when the land and seas are dark.

only the effort is in our hands, Adam. We can't force or focus on what the end looks like; that's in Allah's hands

the miracles, the hardships, the pacing, the climbs, the falls, and the soars, and Adam whispered, And I added, Alhamdulillah for it all

For Adam and Zayneb, it was a realization that love doesn't have a destination. That they had to wake up every day and decide to travel to each other again and again, even if their paths were twisty, or slow, or stalled by a huge avalanche, or cracked in two by an earthquake. Because their hard travel days also created days when they flew to each other. With hardship comes ease. And that truth was the bigger part of the story.

He looked down at me with such love in his eyes that I could feel my whole self flushing.

Everyone is important. When you know that and believe and act upon it, everything and everyone around upou will feel at peace with you