and, far off, raking the grass near the lake where the rectangular tables for dinner will be set.
Muhammad must be super busy. He’s supposed to be coordinating stuff and arranging rides for friends from airports and doing the million other things grooms have to do.
Tats is downstairs waiting for me. I’ll ask her to come up. To walk me down.
Dad will never say anything if she’s with me.
Hey come up for a sec
I look out the window again.
Mom’s out there now on the grass. With Tats. They’re talking to Linda, who’s by the chairs being set up in rows, with an aisle in the middle, in front of the gazebo.
Now it’s being widened. The space between the two sets of chairs.
Just as I’m thinking that my job is going to be to watch all the action and not participate, right under my window, Dad walks out onto the patio.
YES.
He still has the suits in his hands. He’s heading to the barn.
I grab my clipboard and run out of my room, down the stairs, and out the front door to the other side of the house, away from the driveway and the barn and the gazebo, to the space where, when we first drove in, I saw the florist organizing herself.
With Hope Ravson amid her bundles of blue and yellow flowers, I’m pretty sure I’ll be safe from Dad.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
After a “hi,” Hope leaves me alone to contemplate my checklist.
Besides my four main tasks for tonight—welcoming guests, organizing the passing-out of favors, delivering the roast with (cringe) Nuah, training the laddoos and Dawud for their tasks—I have to make sure my uncle, Amu, is all set up for delivering the nikah sermon.
I shoot him a quick e-mail on my phone asking if he needs anything.
On autopilot, I click his website where people ask questions about Islamic topics. Every Thursday, I edit a few for him, and I like to check over how those questions look on the site. It appears this week’s questions haven’t been uploaded yet, but I do a quick scroll-through to see what’s hot right now.
Answers that are read a lot get a flame icon that grows bigger with each hundred views.
The hottest one right now is Wiping on Socks for Wudu Before Prayer. Its flame is almost an inch high.
I keep scrolling through topics and watch the fires get smaller and smaller.
If God Doesn’t Give You a Burden You Can’t Bear, Then Why Do I Feel Like I Can’t Bear It has a small flame.
I click it, remembering what Khadija said to Layth and how he responded that he doesn’t know what he believes anymore.
Dear Imam, we’re always told at the mosque that God doesn’t give you a burden you can’t bear. But I can’t bear what’s happening to me. I don’t want to list all the hardships in my life right now as it will fill more than the space I’m given. My question: Why do so many bad things happen to some people more than others? Is it that I’ve been affected by the evil eye? And why does God say I can bear it?
Answer: Thank you for your most sincere question. I believe it shows a deep longing to understand your faith better, to understand the message of the Divine, to better your situation within the realm the One has created.
On the other hand, it may indicate that you’re on the ebb part of conviction—as our faith ebbs and flows throughout our lives. It may indicate that you’re grappling with how to make sense of where the difficulties of your life lie in the wisdom you’ve been taught about hardships in our lives. It may even communicate a moving toward a dissolution of your faith, which I pray isn’t the case.
Throughout our lives, pain visits us in turns. There isn’t a human alive who hasn’t been touched by pain. We all carry scars and wounds, but only some rise to the surface to be seen and commented on.
Simply put, the story of pain is common to us all. And no, it’s not the evil eye that causes some of us more hardships than others—for a foundation of our faith is that we are not to believe that anything has the power over God to harm us.
But you’re absolutely right—the pain varies. And the intensity of pain varies.
While this is all true, also true is that the intensity levels we feel from our pain vary too.
This is where the teaching comes in that we are