Wow, it took me a couple days to get to my first post post MAS!  Busy, busy. 

As I said in my last post, I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow or day-by-day account of the convention.  Instead, I’ll write about the key events.  First and foremost was when I reached the nadir of morale and thought that the failure I’ve been so afraid of may in fact have caught up with me. 

We got set up early, by noon on Thursday.  People straggled in throughout the afternoon and evening and it was slow, very, very slow.  By the time of jumuah prayers the next day I had made about $92.  My anxiety had been threatening to turn into despair all morning.  I’d start to cry and sniffle a little and then force myself to get over it.  But when I got to jumuah prayers and sat down to wait for the khutbah to start the reality of it hit me, and I started crying.  I cried for the next hour without stopping.  I couldn’t stop because every time I thought about all the work and time and energy and money I had put into this convention and how it might turn out to be a failure I felt distraught.  My stepson wanted to come to the convention that afternoon to see the booth, and I kept thinking how embarrassing it would be to show off what was essentially a failure.  I even thought about just going to my hotel room and staying there for the duration.  I realized that if sales and donations continued at the rate they had been this would be the greatest failure of my life, and that I really didn’t know what I would do.  I really didn’t know.  I only knew that I would feel broken when I got home and that I would spend a lot of time in my office by myself.  I knew that I would not get over it and that it would take a long, long time to think about it without wincing.  I thought about all that and just cried and cried and cried.  I kept a kleenex over my face because I didn’t want anyone to see that I was crying, but I literally had tears soaking through it. 

This is going to sound corny or fabricated, but this is what really happened.  After jumuah I did two extra rakats and sat back down.  A little girl walked in front of me, crying, and I thought to myself, is that me?  Am I going to be a crying, whining little girl or am I going to be a woman, a grown-up, and face the reality of what’s happening and deal with it the best I can, even if it means just salvaging the ruins of my failed effort?  I realized that if I continued to be the whining, crying, immature person I have been for much of my adult life my vision would never become real.  I had to be a grown-up.

I know it sounds trite, but it was a watershed moment.  The only thing that would give me the strength to go back to my failure was that change in attitude.

So that afternoon it started to really pick up and by that evening I had made about $1000.  Things got busier and people got more generous and before I left I had more than tripled that amount.  Alhamdulillah. 

I came sooooo close to the failure that I’ve feared all these months.  So close.  I went to the convention with about $75 in the store’s bank account, and I had personally invested a lot of money it.  But I succeeded, and I feel like now, having a little more money and a little more know-how, I should be able to sustain success as long as I make smart decisions.  So basically over a weekend I went from continual desperation over money to being one or two steps closer to the vision.

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Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org.