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I struggle with copying things from keep notes and using the clipboard function so this might be the second or even third attempt. I know that one was a copy of a text to a friend about some payments that I have been making for his storage. I also struggle with finding my way back to a comment that I want to edit and in this case delete so I apologize if you get something weird

In the early 1990s I was a graduate teaching assistant in speech communication. I had one section that included quite a few Muslim Students from Malaysia. They were funded by the Malaysian government and were there with the intention of teaching English as a second language when they returned home after graduation.

The World Trade Center had been bombed in the parking garage not long before that and I asked some of them what they thought of that. They thought it was terrible and contrary to their spiritual beliefs. The Ku Klux Klan does not represent Christianity and terrorists do not represent Islam.

Two of my students were married. One weekend I took them back home with me to my very small town and church on Sunday,

It hadn't been that long since a Lutheran marrying a Catholic and vice versa was scandalous, so I might have been pushing the envelope, but it really didn't occur to me at the time.

In 2016 my daughter was in intensive care for 13 days and then moved to the infection Ward for another 12. One of her doctors was a Muslim from Pakistan and I shared with that doctor my daughter's concern that because she was there on the lower paying Medicaid they might discharge her early.

The doctor's response was a heartfelt " that wouldn't be fair!"

This reply is leading to a lot of other thoughts and I am recording this in Google Keep notes which I will then paste into my reply to your post on our cousins, so I am going to stop here and use this as an intro to a post on spirituality in Merlin's newsletter

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Mar 23, 2023Liked by S.E. Reid

When I was still working in the office, I worked with three muslim women. One from Afghanistan, one from Pakistan, and one from Sudan. Interestingly, these were the only three I could speak to unrestrained about faith. I don't know what it is about Islam that makes faith in God such an active and dare I say obvious part of life. Most of the Christian world is very sectarian and team-loyal--and in todays culture it is better to assume someone is atheist than to assume they are Christian.

There's good reasons for some kinds of sectarianism--I think people ought to be Catholic, and my muslim colleagues thought I would make a good muslim--but there's kinds of sectarianism that is like loving your team more than you love the sport. Faith in God of any kind is good. When you get more detailed from that, it's easy to rub people the wrong way. This is what makes talking about faith hard--we are very conscious of our differences and it takes more intentional effort to focus on our sameness.

Anyway, all this to say that it was a breath of fresh air to be able to speak about faith without reservation to my muslim colleagues. I learned a lot about Islam and the strength of their devotion from them. We have more in common than we realize.

PS- Islam has a special devotion to the angel Gabriel because they believe it was Gabriel who delivered the Quran to Mohammed. As Christians, we can pray for our Muslim cousins through the intercession of the Angel Gabriel, guardian angel of Muslims!

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I remember this from last year and I loved it then and love it now. I wish this approach to our cousins in the faith was more commonplace - what a different world it would be!

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