A few good men

You know there are those few outsiders in your life whom you’ve known ever since you can remember. Their kind smile, always encouraging you on, making you feel like you’re gonna be something great one day. Then, one day they leave your life, and you realize how much they meant to you. You move on with your life, but whenever you make an accomplishment, you think back, oh how I wish *insert name here* was here to see this.

Thats precisely how I feel about my k-7 teacher. Being home-schooled right up until I got to college, I had the good fortune of having the same teacher from kindergarten till 7th grade. His patience never wore off after having me as a student all those years. Trust me, that is a lot, considering during my k-8 years I wasn’t what you would call a dedicated student, to put it mildly. Despite that, he worked hard with my parents to help me and always told me that I was a bright student and to reach my potential. There are very few teachers today, even in that home-school program, who would go to any lengths to guide a student. Then a week before 8th grade started, I found out he would no longer be teaching at our school. It was tragic. 8th grade went okay, although the graduation felt strange. He put all the effort into all that I had learned, and now somebody else was handing me my certificate. Two years later, I check my e-mail, and a friend e-mailed me telling me that he had passed away. Great, one less kind person around. May Allah guide his family to Islam. Ameen.

Sometimes the people who make a difference in your life in some way happen to be non Muslims, and through that we realize that not all non Muslims aren’t bad. Naturally, we can’t cross the lines, but such encounters help us realize there is some goodness left in the world.