Dear Ramadan, I miss you. The worst part of Ramadan is when it ends. In addition to all the blessing that come with the month, I really enjoy meeting new brothers and having iftar together at the Masjid. Each year, we always say “we should get together after Ramadan but nothing ever happens. This year, a few of us decided to break this cycle and gathered the contacts of those who we met during Ramadan and decided to start having get-togethers at the local Masjid on Fridays. In most Masjids, there is a lot of red tape and politics and getting something like this approved would take weeks, but in this case, I got it approved in less than a minute. This is because this new Masjid is unlike any that we have in our local area. Not only was the whole Islamic center donated by just a husband & wife, but you’ll find the same people cleaning, serving food, and welcoming new comers. What I find more amazing is that there is no politics or hoops to jump through if you want to get things done. The drawback is that many people in the local community just look at it as a place to pray Jummah and don’t see the potential. Thus, it lacks a community to support it, and almost all the workload is handled by a few people. I went to visit their youth group and there was zero people. Zero. So I decided to try something different. I proposed the idea of having a “Game Night” to draw people to the Masjid. At the very least, they would pray Magrib and Isha there and have a place to go since Friday nights have a lot of haram alternatives. 45 people our first Game Night. It became so popular, that we started having them every Friday and about two weeks ago nearly 100 people attended. Most of the people attending were between 15 to 45. Amazing enough, people were driving from different areas to come to the Masjid. Between games, we pray Magrib and Isha together and the place is pretty full Alhamdulillah. Also, after Salat, we have a short reflection to bring us closer to our Deen so Game Night is more than just games. Anyways, we have progress every week Alhamdulillah and we’ve been keeping a blog to record everything we have done so far in case anyone wants to follow our footsteps. Keeping this record will help people learn from what we did right and wrong inshAllah. I call this project “After Ramadan” because the inspiration behind it was to keep our relationships After Ramadan. Check out the progress (updated weekly….scroll down to the very bottom to view first post and work your way up) afterramadan.blogspot
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 19:42:12 +0000
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