Faith

If you have not noticed, I have spent the past couple of days experimenting with new backgrounds on Blogger only to come back to the green grass and blue sky one!  It seemed to work best with the text and all.

Anyhow, this space will be less active soon.  I shall be blogging here http://hardtalkislam.blogspot.com/  Yes, it is about Islam.  My Islam, if you will :) 

Ramadan starts on Tuesday IA.  Between last Ramadan and this one a LOT has happened.  Our little family boat got severely rocked but Alhamdulillah we seem to be in calmer waters :)

I will not cease to say it. And I am not the only one who says it: faith is something amazing.  We all say it.  By we, I mean every single person afflicted with cancer.  How do I know?

I conduct this little experiment everytime I go for radiotherapy.  See, in hospitals, you need to be armed with plenty of patience because the wait can be anything from 20 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes! So, while waiting, we talk.  And I make mental notes.

The drill goes something like this: make eye contact, initiate a conversation, inevitably it is about the when and where and how and what you did about your cancer, then speculate on how you might have got it (genetics/hormonal/food/lack of exercise, all of those factors, pure bad luck, yada yada), the absolute absolute wretchedness of chemotherapy, the relief of being done with torture, the comfort that science has progessed enough that there is now a treatment for this dreadful disease and finally, finally, with a sigh, acknowledge that it is only faith that has held you up through this ordeal. 

You then sit in silence savouring your faith.

All else may vary.  But at the end of it all there is faith.

Yes. Faith it is.