By Romina Afghan
There’s a dark place that every person falls into at least once in their life.
It’s the place that sucks you into feeling doomed, alone, irredeemable, uniquely broken and beyond repair. “Your sins are too many,” it tells you, “Your nature is to set in stone to be good like others. Your habits will never change. You’re too lazy and lacking in discipline to do better. You don’t love Allah enough (or you would have found this easy). You are not sincere (or sincere enough) so Allah won’t help you. You’re too much into the “dunya” so the akhirah is not for you. “You won’t be able to do it, no matter how hard you try.”
And there is a momentary seductive pull in that place that tells you, you’re so uniquely bad, so different that all the usual rules and conventions don’t apply to you. There’s a dark comfort in the fact that you are at least distinctive, and that distinction means that because there are no rules that apply, there’s also nothing that can be done and you can just sit back and be the victim of your aberrant nature.
It’s the place that lures you into thinking you must be perfect, and if you’re not, then you may as well give up. It deceives you into thinking that giving up is the easiest option, the only option. An option where you can enjoy the comfort of “being yourself” and “accepting yourself” and where the consequences are hidden from you, so they seem to be easy to bear. “You are beyond help, so you may as well allow yourself to continue falling into the abyss.”
This is all part of the danger of believing yourself over believing Allah. It’s part of the danger of being arrogant in our “badness” to the extent that we lose hope in our “goodness”, as if our unique badness could be “too much” for Allah to change.
And yet we know there is a part of us that relly wants to believe that things can change for us, that we can change to become who we want to be, for Allah, for ourselves and for our loved ones whom we feel we’re letting down by not being that version of ourselves.
It’s the part of us that just wishes we could have a clean slate, a fresh start where the stains of the past just disappear and don’t shackle us to a version of ourselves that we hate and are ashamed of.
We yearn for that, and there’s a secret behind that yearning.
The secret is the yearning is there for us to seek to have that need fulfilled. The yearning in fact is a way for us to get connected with Allah, our Creator, who is the Only One who can give us what it is we seek – He is the Only One who can wipe your slate clean, and *nothing* you do could be too big, too bad or too hard for Him to change.
He never gives up on you, even when you give up on yourself.
And He invites us to remember this through so many doors:
He gives us Ramadan, the month of Mercy, and embedded within that is the golden opportunity of obtaining Laylat-ul-Qadr, a night which is better than a thousand months.
After that, He gives us the best ten days of the year in Dhull-Hijjah, and embedded within those is the jewel of the day of ‘Arafah, where fasting on that day expiates the sins of two years- the past and the coming. And for those making Hajj there is the unparalleled reward of returning as clean as the day your mother bore you.
“Whoever does Hajj for the sake of Allah and does not have sexual relations (with his wife), commit sin, or dispute unjustly during the Hajj, will come back like the day his mother gave birth to him.” (Al-Bukhaari)
After that in the Islamic calendar we have ‘Ashurah, the day when Musa and the Children of Israel were freed from the Pharaoh, that we also commemorate by fasting and are promised the reward of having a whole year of sins wiped away.
“Fasting the day of ‘Arafah I hope Allah will expiate thereby for the year before it and the year after it, and fasting the day of ‘Ashura I hope Allah will expiate thereby for the year that came before it.” (Muslim)
All these opportunities call to that desire within us to have the past wiped away and bring afresh with our Lord. He continually assures us that change is possible, that how He thinks of us is not the same as how we think of ourselves. He reminds and calls us to Him with multiple opportunities and doors where the chance to turn a new leaf beckons.
He created us, fashioned us in the “best form” and guided us. He guided us to know Him, believe in Him and guided us to want to surrender to Him, because to surrender to Him is not like the darkness of surrendering to our nafs, where pain follows in so many different ways.
To surrender to Him is believing in the light even when you’re in the middle of darkness. It calls forth from your heart that beautiful quality of hope that is one of the sweetest forms of ‘ibaadah (worship) of the heart. Allah wants us to hope in Him, not in our own ability to change something or someone, even if that “someone” happens to be ourselves. He wants us to trust in Him, and our trust in Him can only shine when we are in a situation that we feel stuck in, a situation that is not going the way we want, and we can develop that trust through those small moments of remembering Him and by continually walking through those doors that give us the fresh start and clean slate that we dream of.
Here are three moments that we can use mindfully as moments to remember that Allah never gives up on us:
Wudhu:“None of you who uses water for ablution and rinses his mouth, snuffs up water and blows it, but the sins of his face, and his mouth and his nostrils fall out. When he washes his face, as Allah has commanded him, the sins of his face fall out from the end of his beard with water. Then (when) he washes his forearms up to the elbows, the sins of his arms fall out along with water from his finger-tips. And when he wipes his head, the sins of his head fall out from the points of his hair along with water. And (when) he washes his feet up to the ankles, the sins of his feet fall out from his toes along with water.” [Muslim]
After eating food is another easy opportunity:“He who has taken food and says at the end: All praise is due to Allah Who has given me food to eat and provided it without any endeavour on my part or any power,’ all his past sins will be forgiven.” (Abu Dawoud)
After putting on new clothes: “Whoever puts on a garment and then says: All praise is for Allah who has clothed me with this garment and provided it for me, without any power or might from me. His past and future sins will be forgiven.” (Abu Dawoud)
Our nafs beckons us to prioritise instant gratification and to ‘feel good in the moment’. But this leads to the constant and exhausting task of relentlessly chasing the next feeling and never being content. What He wants for us is not to only feel good in the moment, but to feel good long term and achieve closeness to Him, and to know that that closeness is never more than one du’a, one moment of remembrance away.
About the author
Romina is a mother of four, an Islamic NLP-practitioner, transformation coach, aspiring haafithah and passionate believer in unlocking the wonderful potential of each and every soul by connecting them to Allah and His Book. She has been blessed to be a part of Solace for some years now, and loves connecting with sisters and children everywhere! You can connect with her on Instagram at @connectedcoachingbyrom and listen to her podcast “Grounded in Guidance” at https://anchor.fm/groundedinguidance or on Spotify.
