A morning in the Mosque
I put on a nice button up and some long pants but what shoes should I wear today? I have never gone to a mosque before so I don’t know what to expect. I decide on my crocs since they can easily be removed.
Good Choice.
We go to our normal devotions that morning and now, afterwards, the day is ours. The group of us has already decided that we are going to the mosque in town so we can pray over it and pray for the people that visit it on the regular bases. The four of us arrive at the mosque and have no idea where to enter. We slip our shoes off, place them in the cubby and walk in.
Expectation: to feel a spiritual heaviness in the rooms we are going to be in. (Like I said before, I have never gone to a mosque so everything was a mystery.)
Reality: It smelled weird. It was a little cool in the first room but it wasn’t anything weird about it; just a couple benches where people can lean down and pray.
We walked out of that room into almost like a small courtyard type area with hallways to other rooms. We walk into another room and see a group of Muslim people in a circle reading and talking about the Quran. They all see me, stop talking and just look so I waved, gave a weird smile and slowly backed out of the room….talk about awkward. We then decide to go upstairs and venture around to see this building. One of the first things I noticed about this place was how beautifully built it is. As I walked around I just noticed the beautiful art, marble and craftsmanship of all the pillars and walls. As we walked throughout the building I was praying silently over the place and the people when God started speaking to me. He told me to notice how beautiful these things were, to think about what Solomon’s temple looked like and to just imagine how heaven will look. I was in awe of the thought of heaven in that moment.
We walked into another room upstairs and it was actually a balcony looking over the room where the people who were reading the Quran where. We stayed in that room for a little over an hour. As I stood and watched the people who were studying down below us I prayed for them. As I prayed God spoke to me again. “Even though they don’t serve and worship me Greg, I love them just as much as I love you. I sent my son to die for everyone.” Living in the American culture it is very easy to have a skewed view of other people and religions, especially since the media likes to feed our country anything that will make their ratings go up. During this moment when God is speaking directly to me I noticed myself losing a lot of views and opinions that I didn’t realize I had until then. I looked at these people with compassion and love. God started to allow me to see them the way he did. It was beautiful.
During this moment an elderly man in the circle down below saw a buddy of mine and myself on the balcony looking down at their meeting. Him and another man then proceed to get up from their study, go to the kitchen and come upstairs to greet us with a bag of Doritos and a liter of coke. He then asked us if there was anything else he could get us and told us we were welcomed to stay for as long as we’d like.
I definitely expected them to ask us to leave because, to be honest, I definitely looked like a creep just staring at them.
But they didn’t. Those people showed us so much love by doing so little. Before this morning in the mosque I had only known a little about the Islamic culture but on this day I received first hand experience.
Here are the main two points that I learned about my Christian walk through this experience at the mosque:
- They put us (Christians) to shame. In the works column it isn’t even a competition. These people pray five times a day to a God that doesn’t exist yet you and I have a God who listens to us and we struggle to pray each day outside of saying grace over a meal (and some of us don’t even do that sometimes, myself included). Yeah I know what you are about to say, “Greg, our faith isn’t based on works.” And I completely agree with that but a friend once told me, “Good works won’t save anyone…but they reveal the One who does.” Also James 2:17 says, “So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.” I am not here to jump on you about not doing enough for God, that is between you and him; I just want to challenge you to exam yourself and see where your relationship with him could improve. My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it. But through that I want to pray and be in communion with God so I can impact those around me so they can come to this beautiful realization like I did. You cannot pour out of an empty cup.
- I can definitely learn to show more compassionate to everyone, not just people I feel need it. To Jesus, all sin is equally evil, and all sinners are equally lovable. Though these people I met that morning in the mosque serve a God that isn’t real, it doesn’t mean God doesn’t desire for them to know and be in relationship with him.
The morning in the mosque was an interesting one. I was going expecting to possibly minister to those people but instead God ministered to my heart. He opened my eyes to see the person next to me on the street as a brother or sister, not a stranger.
With Jesus there is no us and them—there is just us.
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