long time coming

Anonymous said...

wow.. assalamu alaikum,
im at the point in my life where everything is going up & down. somedays i am so enthusiastic about islam, but other days im just plain neglectful. these posts and other muslim bros/sis, writings really allow me to come back to myself. but how do maintain a strong imaan without fading off and on??

walaikum assalaam

first of all, i gotta say something. and to do so, i'm gonna paraphrase what one of the speakers said at the ISNA regional conference in DC a couple months ago. it's interesting to note that while the other muscles in the body all go through (insert name of process that muscles go through and use up energy etc - biology major my foot) the tongue is the only muscle that does not go through this. so while you can only do so many sets of curls until you're muscles get tired, you're tongue doesn't have to worry about that, so it can talk and talk and talk and never get tired. this is the way Allah SWT has created us, and it's almost a neat way of telling us that, "talk is cheap!"

and by the way anonymous, i thought about replying as another comment, but i started thinking and decided that this warranted a post of its own, so yeah, i am kinda singling you out (which doesn't matter cuz you're anonymous :D). but anyways, the reason i mentioned what i did above is to say that obviously, talk is cheap, and your words only take life through action. so basically i can give advice, but it's only the same advice that i have to give to myself, cuz i go through the same thing, and everybody else does too.and it's really crazy sometimes how Allah sends people to remind us even if they don't know they're doing the reminding.

the thing is, everybody goes through this same thing that you're talking about. the Prophet SAW himself has mentioned that Iman will increase and decrease. i remember IBOO posted something about this, so i went and dug it up:

Muhammed al Shareef once said that the iman is not a static thing, it is something which goes up and down constantly and the trick is to not allow the lowest valley, of your iman line graph if you will, to get lower than any other previous point your iman has been at. In other words your iman never gets as low as its previous lowest point, and therefore in the long run will ultimately always go up.

so iman is going to go up and down. some days you will feel the sweetness, and some days you won't. both curves are equally important though. they say it takes 23 days to make or break a habit. ramadan is an entire month of spiritual high where we can make and break habits. the same way, there really is no benefit for us to listen to talks and lectures, or read articles, or attend a halaqah or an event if we're just savoring the "feeling" or the EmanRush (TM) that comes afterwards but then do nothing with it. that's like getting a free summer pass to your local gym but you never go to start working out. or getting that free 20oz coke bottle top but never taking it in and getting that free coke. ya'll see where i'm going?

what do we do with this pass? this rush of eman that comes into us? we USE it to bring something into our lives that wasn't there before. take it gradually, but take a sunnah and make it a habit. look at how many of the prophet SAW's sunnah we neglect and are basically nonexistent in our lives! can you imagine living just ONE day doing everything the Prophet SAW did? incorporating all of his practices in a day, into our day? what is wrong with us that we adhere to the sunnah after salah only because the scholars say that if you leave a sunnah mu'akkadah, you are sinning. why can't we adhere to these things because the PROPHET SAW DID THEM, and we want to emulate him??

so back to the topic. we've gotta take steps forward. we can't stay in the endless loop of nonproductivity. we gotta take one thing, and start doing it. take that rush, and use it to start fasting. use it to start making dhikr after fajr, every fajr, everyday. use it to start praying all of your sunnah, every prayer, every day. step by step. and in the beginning, we're going to enjoy it. heh, and this is reminding me of that quote i posted up a while ago, because once you start doing it, you're going to hit the opposite curve, the low end, the dip, the iman "low". Shaytan is going to try and stop you, by hitting you in places you didn't see coming. make you focus more on this stuff than your fardh, or beat you in a couple battles and simply depress you, and this is where Allah will be testing you:

"and so we would pray and taste the sweetness of prayer and iman until Allah decided to test us. and he took away that sweetness to determine whether we were worshipping Him or the sweetness. and that was the struggle, to pray with the same type of resolve, dedication, concentration, even when we didn't exactly 'feel' like it. and so Allah tested us and when we passed this test, he returned that sweetness to us."

~ severely paraphrased. this was actually the same dude who i was talking about earlier, ISNA DC, "talk is cheap"? ya'll remember don't you? don't know his name.

but this is where we have to pass the test. when our iman is "low". stick to it. these things are our lifelines, each one an extra rope thrown into the water for us to hold on to. we gotta hold on to em though.

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heh, i actually wanted to make this post a while ago, it just never happened until now. Ya Allah, make us from those who put into practice the things they hear and say. and make us resolute on this deen. Ameen.

Allahumma A'innee bi thikrika wa shukrika wa husni ibadatika. Ameen.

walaikum assalaam