Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

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from very, very little is from Allah.
Some people, they take pride, they say, 
‘
you know when I started my
business all I had was my laptop, all I had was a hundred dollars, all I had were
the clothes on my back and then I made some smart investments’, and they tell
you their success story. Allah is telling us what happens even before that success
story. He didn’t just say that there is a little bit of water and a lot of plants grew,
He said a little bit of water that 
We
sent down from the sky, then a lot of plants
grew. In other words, even your initial investment: where did you get it from?
Where do you think you got it from? You started taking pride? With so little and
look at how I made it grow. Allah says that so little wasn’t even yours, I gave it
to you. I started your business; you didn’t start your business. I started your
career; you didn’t start your career. I helped you grow. 
Fa-khtalaṭa bihī nabāt
al-arḍ.
So now this garden is impressive. And, by the way, the example that was
just given in the surah was about a garden. And so He says 
fa-aṣbaḥa hashīman
—beautiful words—He says then over time it became 
hashīm
. 
Hashīm
in Arabic
is something that is cut up, something that is dismembered. You know when you
pull a little piece of a branch off, or snap a twig that becomes 
hashīm
—it’s
broken up. There’s a tree or a plant and you pull off a leaf then this leaf becomes
hashīm
, it’s cut off from the rest, and this leaf is now useless. It doesn’t have life
any more. You can’t give it life again, it’s dead.
So Allah says these plants that grew, then out of nowhere they became
useless, they became 
hashīm tadhrūhu al-riyāḥ
—and they became so useless
that the winds can throw them around where ever they want. And not just one

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wind Allah says 
riyāḥ
—multiple winds. One wind takes them this way and
another wind takes them another way. It’s a very interesting parable. Recently I
was in Seattle, I was just walking around in one of the market places and they
had an antique store. I walked into an antique store and you see all this old stuff
from the sixties, the forties, the twenties. You see a 1920s radio, you look at that
radio and you start thinking: man, there was a time when this was the most
expensive thing. There’s going to be a time when somebody’s going to walk into
that antique store and there is going to be an iPad sitting there and people are
going to be like: ‘Oh, that is old. Wow, people used to use that thing?’ It’s going
to be like that, right? It’s going to be an antique.
And what happens to those things you buy? You use them until they become
old then, they go into your closet, or they go into your attic. Then from your
attic, you’re moving and you just give it as a donation to somebody. And it goes
around and around and ends up in the antique store, right? And why does it go
around so much? Nobody wants to hold onto it, they just want to get rid of it
because it’s worthless. Allah compares the things you own that are so valuable to
you right now, but in just a little bit of time, they are going to be in some attic.
They are just going to be passed around by people until they are going to end up
in a trash dump. They are going to be moved around from here to here to here;
that same plant that was so beautiful, so lush, you walk into that place and it’s a
garden and then you come back and you realize that entire garden is gone, it’s
dried up twigs and the winds have taken those twigs from here to there to there.
You don’t even know where they end up—