Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

fa-mā ūtītum min shay’in
. It’s captured
within it.
So this 
āyah
is going to make a commentary about my entire existence on
this earth. Before I go any further, a reflection just on the fact that the passive
form was used, 
ūtītum
—that you’ve been given. In other words, none of the
experiences I’ve enjoyed—not just the things that I own or that I think I own—
rather none of the experiences that I had in life are actually mine. They were a
door that was opened to me by Allah (
subḥānahu wa-taʿālā
). He was the one
that opened every chapter of my life, one adventure to the next, to the next, to
the next. For those of you that are married; who you married, and if there was a
process before you got married, every part of that process was actually from
Allah. Every single conversation was from Allah. This entire story of ours—and
we don’t remember so much of it. When we look back we don’t remember so
many things that happened in our own lives, but they were all from Allah.
Actually, the last ten years, it’s becoming more and more of a blur for me. I
don’t know what I was up to in 2007, I can’t tell you, I don’t know. It’s just
becoming blurred together; I can’t tell you what happened in 2011 or 2012. I
look at my children and they’re growing. My now almost twelve year old, I look
at her and it’s hard for me to remember what she looked like when she was four.
I have to look at a picture to try and remember, I can’t remember that anymore.
But Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) gave me each and every one of those experiences—
whether I remember them, or I am conscious of them or not. All of them
together, Allah sums up in one phrase 
fa-matāʿ al-ḥayāt al-dunyā
. Basically, the
culmination of all of our life experience, whatever good, whatever bad, or
whatever we think was good or bad happened to us, boils down to one thing: 
fa-
matāʿ al-ḥayāt al-dunyā
—which is roughly translated as: the enjoyment of
worldly life. All the things that you have been given; all they are is just the
enjoyment of worldly life.
I wanted to explore, in this reminder, the meanings of the word 
matāʿ
in a

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little more depth. More than what we’ve heard before. Those of you that have
been listening to my 
khuṭab
and 
durūs
before, I’ve discussed 
matāʿ
before as
something to utilize but not necessarily to enjoy. This is part of the base meaning
like that little girl, who al-Aṣmaʿī saw, who was scrubbing dishes at the bank of
a river. Her goat came, grabbed the scrubber and ran away with it. She started
crying and saying, 
akhadha matāʿī
—he took my 
matāʿ
away—the brush that I
was scrubbing with, right? So from it he derived that 
matāʿ
must amount to
things like a spoon, or a fork or a shovel something that you use but you don’t
necessarily enjoy. Nobody grabs a spoon and says, ‘Check this out! Check what
I’ve got!’ Nobody shows off their spoons and forks and shovels unless they’re in
the industry or something, but typically, you don’t do that. So it’s something that
you use but you don’t necessarily enjoy. But I decided to dig a little bit deeper
into this word and see what else has been said in the literary precedent of the
Arabic language because at the end of the day this word, like this 
āyah
, has
pretty significant importance. My entire life is being summed up by this one
word. My whole life, on this planet, amounts to this one word. So I should
understand what connotations this word possesses.
The first thing I found interestingly—very recently actually—they used