Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

yuntafaʿu bihi
.
Then: 
wa-yutaballagh wa-yutazawwad
—and it can be put to use. It can be
put to use—
yutazawwad bihi
. Now Allah is saying every single object that we
own, every last bit of our possessions and every single experience is actually
supposed to be utilized. Adversity and good times, all together, are supposed to
be put to use. They are part of something greater. Meaning this life, the things
that we are given, they are given to be put to use.
This takes us back to the original meaning of 
matāʿ
. What happens to wine?
Not by Muslims but by non-Muslims, what happens to wine or to alcohol, when

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it matures? It gets drunk. What happens to the rope when it gets twisted? It gets
used. When your life is full of 
matāʿ
, now it’s time for you, yourself, to put
yourself to use. Looking back, for a lot of people when they look back at their
life, their past experiences, their failures and their tragedies; they debilitate them
and they are not able to do anything in their future. But for people who
understand what 
matāʿ
is, what this world is for, they look at their past
experiences and it makes them stronger. That Allah put me through that must
mean I’m stronger than this and maybe I can help a million other people; help
them go through these experiences and see them in the way that they’re
supposed to be seen. This would be looking at one’s own experiences as 
matāʿ
.
Now going a little further—
wa-l-fanā’ ya’tī ʿalayhi
— part of the definition
of 
matāʿ
is something that will come to end; will not last. It cannot be used
forever. That scrubber will break eventually, or won’t scrub as good as it used
to. That rope will eventually snap. Even that wine will eventually be no good.
So, every single thing that we possess is not here forever.
Today we are a senior living, in a facility where people that have a difficult
time taking care of themselves are being taken care of. And where I teach at
Bayyinah, the average age among our students and the faculty that’s there, it’s
younger people. There’s typically a young audience in the Jumuʿah. We feel like
we have some things that they don’t have. Someone might feel, as they walk by
someone who’s in their nineties, or someone who’s using a cane, or someone
who can’t even take two steps by themselves—they might look at them and say,
‘
Subḥān Allāh
, I feel bad for these people’. But you know what? Either we’re
going to be in the ground or we’re going to be one of those people; we’re going
to be in that state one day. And they, if you ask them, ‘Look back at what you
had in life’, they’ll say, ‘It felt like a day or like the blink of an eye—
lamḥ al-
baṣar
—that’s all it felt like’. Time passes by so, so quickly, 
subḥān Allāh
. We
have to be conscious of the fact that time is leaving us. This 
matāʿ
is not staying.
Our entire life is passing us by and the only thing, at the end of it, that we can
put it to use for is the 
ākhirah
.
So Allah says: 
wa-mā ʿind Allāh khayrun wa-abqā
. What I want to share
with you is that in this life, some-times we make a plan for the next ten years or
five years. This is what I want to accomplish; this is how much Qur’an I want to
memorize; this is how much I’d like to be able to make in terms of money; this
is when I would like to get married. We set goals for ourselves and we strive
towards those goals, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I tell you if you
internalize this 
āyah
. You learn to put those plans in one compartment in your

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head, and in the other compartment you realize that all of that means nothing if
I’m not building my 
ākhirah
. All of those plans are worthless; they are
meaningless; they are not any kind of accomplishment at all, if this is not
building me towards Allah, if it’s not taking me closer to Him, if it’s not making
me a slave of Allah.
There are people’s perceptions of us and then there’s the reality. People’s
perception, our own perception and the reality. People’s perceptions may be
you’re successful; people’s perception may be your knowledgeable or you’ve
accomplished something. And the opposite is true too, people’s perception might
be, you’re worth nothing but you know what? People’s perceptions, at the end of
the day, mean nothing. It stands to give you nothing before Allah. It will not add
to your deeds, it won’t take away from them. People’s criticisms will not take
away from you and people’s praise will not add to you. It will not. At the end of
the day, when people get praise and criticism from others all the time, you know
what starts happening? They start getting affected by it. They start seeing
themselves in light of how other people see them. So their image of themselves
becomes polluted because they’re not seeing themselves for who they really are,
they’re seeing themselves in light of other people’s words. That’s a human
phenomenon. This is why we have Allah’s word. So we can see ourselves in
light of Allah’s words; and that will help us see ourselves for who we really,
truly are.
At the end of the day, truly, we can have friendships and family and loved
ones and community, we can have all of those things. But at the end of the day,
we are in this world alone. We came alone, and we are going to leave alone. And
in that solitude, if you don’t find a connection with Allah, then all these fake
connections that you and I have, that are not really based on a relationship with
Allah, they will all disappear. They will not last. The façade will dissipate
eventually, if not in this life then in the next. So we have to internalize a very
powerful reality that Allah has given us: