if life is a test, then let my only answer be awe

rediscovering god in the absence of fear and the presence of wonder

there was something spectral that unsettled me as a child. something quiet and sad that i couldn’t name, but felt all the same. something tender, something heavy. a sadness that moved beneath the skin of silence. i couldn’t name it then, not exactly, but i felt it the way you feel a storm before it breaks.

 it wore the faces of old religious folk. not all elders, no. only a certain kind. their fingers clung to prayer beads not with peace, but as if holding onto a thread stretched thin over an empty space. each bead a muttered apology to a god they feared more than they trusted, more than they loved. you could see it in their eyes: that flash of dread even in laughter, the way joy seemed to pass through them without landing. as though they were already half-ghosts, living on the cautious edge of eternity.

they were not cruel. quite the opposite, in fact. the generosity of people who were trying to be good, not because goodness lit something alive in them, but because they were terrified of what might happen if they weren’t. it was a kindness warped by terror. a generosity tinged with desperation. like if they didn’t perform goodness loudly enough, a cosmic tally would mark them down. hell was always hovering behind their sentences. i remember one telling me, softly but firmly, “this world is only a test. don’t get too attached.” 

but i was attached.

i loved the world in the way a child loves. with an openness so wide it aches. i loved the sharp tang of green apples, the way sunlight fractured across puddles after rain, the hush that falls just before dusk when streetlights flicker awake like cautious sentinels. i loved songs that made no sense to my young mind but somehow found the shape of my chest anyway. i remember wondering: if all of this is just a prelude, a hollow rehearsal before some ‘real’ reality… why does it move me so completely? why does it feel like truth lives here, in the small, bright, breakable things?

that kind of fear-drenched devotion felt like an insult to the intricacies of life.

i watched those elders waste away in the masjid and the worn-out prayer rugs in their living rooms, and being equally worn thin by guilt. i can still remember the way the floors smelled in summer. dust, old carpet, and lemon-scented cleaner. the kind of smell that stuck to your clothes, that made your throat dry if you knelt too long. everything felt heavy, like the air itself was holding its breath.

they never dared to touch joy without flinching. they didn’t dance. they didn’t sing unless it was a nasheed. they didn’t laugh too loudly or love too freely. they lived on edge, afraid of messing up the exam of existence. their days felt like a long, trembling apology for the sin of being alive. 

and deep down, even as a child, i felt this resistance blooming in me. a voice that said: if this is the shape that faith must take, then perhaps what they fear isn’t real. maybe god isn’t the voice condemning you, but the one you hear when you stop apologising for being human. who then waits for you at the edge of silence, when you’ve run out of apologies and begin, finally, to speak like a human again.

the older i grow, the more i believe that there is something sacred in simply being here. to live in fear is not to live. it is to prepare, endlessly, for your own burial. to rehearse your final breath before you’ve learned how to inhale without shame. and what a cruel trick, to be handed a life so full of wonder, only to be told it’s a trap. a decoy. a test you are always on the verge of failing

but no. i reject that.

i don’t know what waits beyond this life, or if anything does. but i’m certain that what’s here matters.

i want to taste, to touch, to grieve, to laugh. i want to trust that love is not a sin and wonder is not a weakness.

 if life is a test, then let my only answer be awe.