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is a witness to the love of Allah and a sign of His wisdom. Keep this love inside you and love with it all the time, because the moment you lose it, you lose yourself; you lose Him.”
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After all, only God can see into a person’s heart, so only God can say who has genuine faith in their hearts. It is not up to us to make that decision.
Everyone else may leave, everything else may break, but Allah will forever be your most faithful and intimate friend.
God sees the tears you hide with smiles and He embraces the pain you think no one would understand.
a single leaf cannot fall on the entire Earth without God’s knowledge, how could your heart break without His healing presence embracing you?
When we surrender to God’s will even when things do not go as planned, we are still grateful, because we know that God’s plan will always be greater than our greatest dreams.
It is only in trusting the Divine and becoming a servant of Allah that the soul experiences true freedom.
Just as the sun doesn’t stop shining if we close our eyes, when we sin it is not that God hates us, but rather we who are closed off from experiencing His love.17
Therefore, next time, instead of only praying for justice when others wrong you, consider praying for Allah’s mercy upon them as well.
Your sins and scars can never remove God’s presence from your heart, because regardless of who you are or who you have been, God’s mercy will always encompass you.
Our journey on Earth is not just to God, it is from God, with God, and into the love of God.
After all, how can you experience forgiveness if you never make a mistake?
Despite all that we are given by God, there are still days that our freedom leads us to despair, as we attempt to swim against the current of God’s will, feeling the friction between what we want and what Allah knows we need.
how can you long for oneness if you have only ever been a separate body? How can you long for perfection if you have never experienced it? How can you long for an all-encompassing love if you have never tasted it?
“And whoever guards himself for Allah, He shall cover over his evil deeds and grant him a vast reward” (65:5).
“Our Lord! We have wronged ourselves. If You do not forgive us and have mercy upon us, we will surely be among the losers.” QUR’AN 7:23
True gratitude or shukr, is not based on your circumstance but based on the state of your spirit.
When we are only thankful when we get what we want, then our gratitude is a product of our ego.
Prophet replied by saying Afala akuna abdan shakura, which means, “Should I not be a thankful servant?”
We manifest true gratitude when we use our eyes to see God’s signs, when we use our ears to hear God’s words, when we use our tongue to remember our Lord, when we use our hands to give charity, when we use our feet to walk the path of truthfulness, love, kindness, justice, and mercy.
Alhamdullilah is among the first words the people of Paradise will say (7:43).
ingratitude is one of the greatest enemies of faith.18
our actions have the power to veil us from the gifts that God has given us. Our sins can become a blindfold over our spiritual eyes. Repeatedly sinning without polishing our hearts through the practice of repentance (tawba) can prevent us from seeing God’s beauty (18:101).21
“Compete with each other in performing good deeds” (2:148), because “those who believe and do good work, they are the people of Paradise, in it they abide eternally” (2:82).
that only he or she will prosper “that brings to Allah a sound heart” (26:89). It is only when outer obedience unites with sincere inner submission that the eyes of the heart awaken to witness and receive the love of God.
the ego is a veil between our consciousness and our spirit.
purification and detachment of the ego is so vital within Islam because the more we purify the illusions of the self, the more we are able to witness the light of Allah.
God breaks us down to break us through because the shell of sin has to be broken before the spirit can flower.
So that we know what it felt to turn back to Him. We felt that we have been far from Him.
despite the ego being a veil before God, when transformed and purified it allows us to have a true experience of God.
“Sometimes you have to lose what you have and find it again for you to know the value of the blessing that you have always owned.”
Just as Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden to actualize its worth, we were not sent to this Earth as a punishment, but rather as a test and as a means of learning to be grateful for all that God has already given us.26
all things begin and end with love.
Even if we have lived a life with more rainy days than blue skies, behind every cloud, the sun of Allah’s unconditional love is always present.
It is the love of Allah that takes a mortal moment in time and makes it everlasting. It is through love that we taste infinity. It is through love that we undergo a spiritual alchemy in which our stony hearts are transformed to gold. It is love that pulls a rose out of a sea of thorns, gives wings to a caterpillar, makes granite into rubies, and reminds us we are far more infinite than our weight in dirt. It is through love that the heart can reach God. It is the longing of love that pushes our seedling hearts to reach through an earth of darkness for a light it feels but cannot see.
At its essence, divine worship is the highest station of love, because you cannot worship something until you love it. But in order for love to exist, so must free will, because love cannot be coerced, it cannot be created by force.
Allah gave us free will, not so we would choose to create evil, but so that we could choose to experience divine love and in turn love God.
Allah allowed for the possibility of our turning away from Him in order for us to manifest our free will and create the possibility for love to exist.
The gift of free will creates the contrast necessary to know God, to experience His love, and from a place of passionate gratitude to worship Him.
To know our Lord, we must learn to embrace our life instead of always trying to escape it. God speaks to us both through our blessings and our trials.
“Amazing is the affair of the believer, verily all of his affair is good and this is not true for anyone except the believer. If something good befalls him he is grateful and that is good for him. If something of harm befalls him he is patient and that is good for him.”29
for divine love awakens in our spirits when we begin to really taste how needy and desperate we are for God.
so our longing to love God is a manifestation of Him having loved us first.
Love is not something we create or find in the world; it is a part of who we are. Since we tend to have an affinity toward the goodness of those we resemble, the more we mirror God, the more our love of God blossoms. The more we accompany those who love God and reflect God’s qualities of kindness, compassion, mercy, and peace, the more we are drawn into the oneness of His love. We are like the moon: the more we turn away f...
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Sincere worship is not born from the soil of obligation, but from gratitude for all that God has freely given to us before He gave us the mouths to even thank Him.
When we turn our worries into worship, through prayer, repentance, and remembrance of Allah’s names, our awareness shifts from how big our problems are to how big our Lord is, and we feel peace.
The path to God begins with witnessing and experiencing your human qualities, because you cannot actualize what you have not acknowledged.
When we shift our perspective from what God is doing to us, to what God is doing for us, we are able to see that although God may not always give us what we want, He will always give us exactly what we need.
He gives you people to love you, to leave you, to inspire you, to doubt you, and to believe in you. Out of His love, God lets the world hurt you and break you, not because He wants to destroy you, but because He wants to show you your hidden strengths that can only be manifested in the cocoon of trials.
God takes us into the cave of difficulty and pain when there are gems for us to find there. God pushes us to the edge of the cliff when He wants us to learn how to fly. The difficulties we face can act as catalysts for self-discovery and growth.
