Awakening to faith is not a one-time event, but a continuously unfolding reality. The journey of faith is not a race, but a marathon of love that each person walks at a different pace.

It suddenly became clear to me that the whole purpose of faith is not to be "good enough" before we begin on the path to God, but to come with all our deficiencies to God, knowing that only He can fill in our gaps through His mercy.

I was ready to be molded. I felt like clay in the hands of the Maker. I trusted that God would make a way for me–not because of who I am, but because of how merciful and loving He is.

Where Allah is metaphorically whole, we are nothing but holes...In essence, when we reach for anything in existence other than Allah, we are reaching for emptiness...It is only when we reach for God that we are spiritually filled and content.

There are countless veils between us and God, but no veils between Him and us.

God's love is intimately woven within every beat of our hearts. In fact, the Arabic word for God, Allah, begins with an "Ahh" sound, which in theories of sacred sound is the sound of manifestation, the sound we allegedly make when our hearts open. Symbolically, this sound represents the human being bursting forth from the nothingness of silence into manifested existence through God's speech.

Since in Arabic there is not a gender-neutral pronoun such as "it," Allah uses huwa or "He" in reference to Himself because in Arabic the male gender form is inclusive of the female, not exclusive.

It is not our prayer and worship of God that makes God love us; rather, it’s God’s unconditional love for us that results in our worship. We do not pray for the love of God, but from the love of God. God’s power inspires and allows us to pray, and it’s that same divine power that we are calling to in prayer. As Rumi says, “I am a mountain. You call, I echo.

Just as a stone that is dropped anywhere in a lake creates ripples that reach across the entire body of water, when one of us is suffering, that pain ripples through all of existence. As Rumi said, “The differences are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight looks slightly different on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different on this other one but it is still one light.