#ended up writing this after futoor and coffee

[mrsq8geek]

Ramadan Challenge 2024, Day 3

Day 3: What is your favorite act of worship? Has it always been your favorite?

Fasting tatawu' and sadaqa, hands down.

I love the personal quality of volunteering to fast extra days.  Fasting Ramadan is already plenty blessed, but from a young age I especially liked the various hadiths about fasting additional days, be it Mondays & Thursdays or the three white days.  Fast three days a month and you've fasted the whole year?  Yes please!?

A lot of worship is symbolic and not really about what you're doing, but about everything else around it, and to me, volunteering to fast is like that.  It's not going through the motions, it's the intention, which is really what counts anyway.  Alhamdulillah I'm grateful I got to fast a lot when I was younger, because things have gotten a lot harder post-covid.  I'm hopeful we'll swing back around and I'll get to do it again.

As for sadaqa… again this is personal to me, I grew up very aware that people are in different socioeconomic classes.  Some of my cousins were kids of actual millionaires, with diamond-encrusted watches as teenagers, while others were living six people in a backyard trailer, and everything in between.  I grew up as something I came to call "fake poor"-- we weren't really poor, but my foundational years were during a rough few years, for a bunch of legitimate reasons, so I lived "poor" for the main part of my childhood.  Our situation got better when I was in high school, but when you grow up poor (or thinking you're poor because you don’t know any better), that gets ingrained in you.

These two ayas are the reason I started giving sadaqa as soon as I had my own salary.  Because I was very aware of what it was like to have or not have the money you need to do things for yourself, and I'd seen a range of examples in my family.  Whatever I saved was precious to me, which is exactly why it's meaningful for me to give from that.

We have a local saying that goes "money is the filth of dunya" and that's even more reason to take out that trash!

Similarly since covid, things have become quite tight financially, so now that's how we've been living.  I'm used to tightening the belt, but the difference between now and my childhood is now I'm the one making the financial decisions.  And when things are this hard, you find out who you can really trust.  People who I thought I could rely on turned out to be, well, allahuma inni saima.  Others surprised me with their kindness and generosity.

When I was giving sadaqa when I was younger, I didn't have in mind some kind of karmic quid pro quo.  But being on the receiving end now, I believe even more that the system works.  Every little bit really does help.

Even clicks.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 4