Maybe the time isn’t right, and the spirits aren’t ready, and barely anyone is managing to hold themselves together. But community service and volunteering in times of crisis make a huge difference—not only for the people we help but also for our own psychological, personal, and professional growth.
This is a call to break through the barriers of shock, depression, and despair, and to start healing the wounds of our homeland and its people. If you have a job, what’s stopping you from volunteering alongside it? If you don’t, step up, offer your services, and start working—even a small self-initiated idea in your specialty, like teaching, caring for the wounded, helping with daily needs, or supporting vulnerable groups like unaccompanied children and widows of martyrs.
Countless families sleep on the streets, displaced and without support, needing guidance to shelters or a simple refuge of wood, cloth, or plastic sheeting. Children and women exhausted and broken by massacres, left unprotected, without anyone to help even with transportation to safe areas. Children whose greatest wish is just a pack of noodles to sell so they can feed their families. Young people with severed limbs needing transport to institutions to connect with officials and raise their voices. Patients who don’t even know they are sick, dying before doctors can reach them. Hungry people and those willing to feed them—both needing someone to bridge the gap.
The work is vast, enormous—but who will answer the call?
People will naturally gather around you, teams will form and grow, institutions will notice, your idea will spread through media, and you will become a role model. Like a rolling snowball, your effort will grow and inspire everywhere. Soon, you will find yourself leading a great cause, opening doors to blessings, happiness, and success on a personal level as well.
Yes, you yourself may need help and struggle to provide for your children. But staying home or in a tent, surrendering to mental death, solves nothing. Step out, contribute, volunteer—and you will find the doors of sustenance opening by God’s will. You will help others, support your family, heal your spirit, and create stories of glory and heroism to tell your children and grandchildren once this disaster ends.
You never know—through serving others, you might receive God’s greatest gift in your life: a job, a scholarship, or a gateway to the future.
There are many doors of goodness—knock on one to open others. Everywhere there are families unable to reach institutional doors, no strength to compete in queues, no path to basic necessities. They extend their hands day and night to God—why not be His messenger to them, used in serving His servants?
This crisis is an opportunity for immense good—a rare and great gateway to paradise. Those who miss it, filling their pockets with good deeds and stories of kindness, are like travelers passing a thousand oases in the desert but dying of thirst with an empty water bag on their backs.
These words come from my dear friend Muhammad Al-Akshiya, and I fully agree with him… God help us all.
