Ramadhan 2019

Assalamualaikum.

Almost the end of Ramadhan. Alhamdulillah, this is our first Ramadhan together. It's a mixture of feelings but alhamdulillah, I am grateful for this opportunity.

My Ramadhan theme this year: to contribute more to the people around me. Not just reaching out more, but it's more like finding the meaning behind each action. Still struggling to find ways to achieve this honestly. But will try my best :)

Spiritual wise, this Ramadhan I put more emphasize in reading Quran. I no longer have super ambitious wish to finish the whole 30 Juz this year, but I try to be more consistent in reading. One of the things that help is I try to pick up this habit again before Ramadhan. It is one of my 2019 resolutions: to read Quran more consistently. Alhamdulillah, it gets easier once we kicked off fasting. The journey is also more exciting because both Fitri and I have the same goal, so we manage to encourage each other to read more. Another thing I try to do this Ramadhan is revisiting my Arabic vocabulary. Even if I don't understand the whole verse, at least, capturing some words out of the whole page make me feels happy already.

This Ramadhan also makes me think of many questions, and one of them that hits me hard is this:

Kita beribadah kerana Allah, atau kerana orang di sekeliling kita? Like, if we are alone do we pray as hard as when people watching us?

Talking about ikhlas, I once read a story about how this one imam (Imam Ghazali) gets 'the best place' because he let a fly drink from his ink. Subhanallah. You never know which amalan you did that will help you to enter Jannah, and being ikhlas is the key. "Bagai semut hitam, di atas batu hitam di tengah kegelapan". This is like a boost for people to try harder, do better because you never know exactly what amalan can get you elevated.

Another thing that I've learned this Ramadhan is consistency. I am not a good friend of consistency and I struggle a lot for the rest of my life. You know how people always chasing for odd nights during the last 10 days of Ramadhan? Well, I learn it the hard way that you should not really aim for the odd nights. In order to be able to perform ibadah on the odd nights, you have to pick yourself up and do ibadah even on the even nights. There's no way you could be able to keep up with temptations and nafs, if you only targeting few nights only. In fact, the ibadah should be maintained from the beginning of Ramadhan. Well to think about it, it should be practiced through out our life.

Thats all for now. There's few more days left for Ramadhan, let's try our best to grasp everything possible!

Love, Husna.