Broken yet Faithful. From the Journal of Umm Zakiyyah

I lived so much of my life as a problem solver. When I was younger, math had been my favorite subject in school, and I’d always looked forward to the challenging problems it presented. Behind all the alphabetic variables, cryptic charts, scrambled values, and geometric shapes was always a single numerical solution.
If you got the wrong answer, it was because you missed something, because you looked away when you should have been paying attention, or because you gave up on yourself when you became too consumed in helplessness to lift your head and see that the answer was literally right in front of you, even if not in the form you found easiest to understand.
And to me, math was the language of life. That is, until I began to live life beyond the confines of a school building and the clarity of a numerical grading system.
Shortly after graduating from college, I found myself at odds with those I loved most because I was pursuing what I valued most—my faith in God. When they expressed anger and disapproval with the evidence of my spiritual growth, I frantically searched my mind for a solution that would give us all what we wanted. And I failed.
It took years of trying and disappointing, hoping and suffering, and giving up even my peace of mind before I realized that they wanted from me something that I could not give. Because my soul did not belong to me. It belonged to God.
But my heart was connected to them, and I valued their happiness more than I valued my own. So began the painful battle between my heart and soul, hence the beginning of my emotional breaking. But by God’s mercy, I retained my faith, hence the title Broken yet Faithful.
Here I share some of my journal reflections from that difficult time along with abstract art pieces by Cynthia Lyles, which were inspired by my words.