Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

duʿā’
, you notice, even though 
Mūsā
(
ʿalayhi al-
salām
) is homeless, he’s a fugitive from the law, he has no clothes other than the
ones he is wearing on his back, he has no provisions with him—clearly he is
stopping at this pond to drink some water because he doesn’t even have food and
drink. He’s pretty much at the point of desperation, as desperate as a human
being can get. And yet, when he helps these women, he doesn’t expect from
them; he still expects from Allah. When you do something voluntarily, because
he volunteered, right? He didn’t say, ‘Well how much are you going to pay me?’
By the way that was work, and if you do work, it’s okay for you to ask for
wages—it’s not a problem. If you do work for someone it doesn’t have to be
voluntary. But he volunteered himself, which means once you offer yourself
voluntarily, don’t expect compensation. If you are expecting compensation,
bring that up from the very beginning. Say from the very beginning, ‘Look, I
need to get paid for this’. A lot of times, for example, we volunteer for projects
or for the masjid and in the back of our heads we’re thinking, ‘I volunteered the
entire month of Ramadan. On the twenty-seventh they are going to have an
award ceremony for me; they are going to hand me something; they are going to
give me some appreciation.’ Even if that expectation is in our head, we are
missing something from this 
duʿā’
. We cannot have that expectation. 
Mūsā
(
ʿalayhi al-salām
) turns away from them and sits back down under the shade, he
talks to Allah and he says to Allah some of the most incredible words in the
Qur’an:
… “My Lord, I am truly in great need of any good that You might
send down to me.”
(Al-Qaṣaṣ 28: 24)

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Rabbī innī limā anzalta ilayya min khayrin faqīr
: Master, whatever you sent
down my way—and this is in the past tense, I did not say whatever you ‘send’
down my way but whatever you ‘sent’ down my way: 
anzalta
. Whatever you
already sent down, I was in desperate need of it. In other words this shade and
that water in front of him, that’s all he gets right now. He doesn’t have a house,
he doesn’t have food, he doesn’t have anything else; and yet he is looking at all
of this and telling Allah, ‘
Yā Allāh
, thank you so much for this; I desperately
needed it’. In other words, before asking Allah for more, he is concentrating on
what Allah has already given him.
If you look at it from our perspective, he has nothing. He’s got absolutely
nothing! But from his perspective, he was in the middle of the desert and there is
no logical reason why he couldn’t have died of dehydration. The fact that he
made it all the way to the water, and the fact that he found a place to sit which is
under a shade, which Allah mentions—
thumma tawallā ilā al-ẓill
; the fact that
he found that much and on top of all of this the fact that he found an opportunity
to do a good deed is enough for him to be grateful. Instead of thinking about
what he doesn’t have, he turns to Allah and says, basically, I’ll put it in easy
language for you: ‘
Yā Allāh
, I really needed that, thanks! I really needed that; I
was so desperate, I would have died without this help of yours’—
Rabbī innī limā
anzalta ilayya min khayrin faqīr
.
Subḥān Allāh
! What a different attitude—he is constantly thinking about
what he has to be grateful for.
Now there is more meaning to this 
duʿā’
; the other piece of this 
duʿā’
that’s
remarkable is that