Alhamdulillah,Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah!!! Finally, someone has increased a year. WOW!!! Many years, many years of my journey in this dunya. Imagine yourself travelling for many years still not reaching your destination, Subhanallah! I dunno about you but for me, that would be very depressing. I'd always be worried about when i'l go back home. What makes this different tho is that we are on a journey, to our eternal abode. To our Rabb, our creator. As rasulullah (salallahu alayhi wa sallam) said: "Be in this life as if you were a traveler/wayfarer on a journey". In this journey, we stumble a lot, and sometimes we fall. But what keeps me going is that I know my Rabb, the most merciful Lord, Allah (subhanahu wa ta3ala) is always willing and ready to pick me up each time I fall. He is ready to accept every one of us each time we turn back to Him no matter how much we think our sins are. His mercy is greater than all our sins no matter how much they are. He sees us through every step in our journey, and each time we get back up, we rise up better than we were when we fell. He puts the obstacles in our way to test us, to see how we would react to them. To see if we would turn to Him, to cry to Him, to beg Him for help. He puts these tests before us, to draw us closer to Him.
Oh yah, I haven't said what makes this journey different. In the former journey I spoke about, you wouldn't want to spend any more time away from your home & family and all that. Well, this one is also similar & different. Just like you wouldn't want to spend too many years without your family, so would you be eager to return to your creator, to reunite with your family & the muslims in Jannah insha Allah. But then again, what have you prepared for your encounter with your Lord? How much (deeds) have you gathered to be rewarded with Jannah? These thoughts make us want to stay in this dunya for a longer time, but we all have limited times to spend before we transit to our second part of this journey, "our graves". As i've learnt, this journey of ours is of 3 stages, just like having three tickets for a long journey. The first ticket is born when a person is born, which is the beginning of this whole journey. This whole life is our first transit in the journey. It is only in this first journey that we have the chance to make decisions on our own and any decision we choose to make in this journey is what determines our fate through out the rest of the journey. What hurts the most about this first journey is that we tend to forget that we are even on a journey. Man gets so absorbed in the sweetness of this dunya that he forgets his true purpose in life. Which reminds me of a story I once came across...
"Once a man saw in his dream, that a lion was chasing him. The man ran to a tree, climbed on to it and sat on a branch. He looked down and saw that the lion was still there waiting for him. The man then looked to his side where the branch he was sitting on was attached to the tree and saw that two rats were circling around and eating the branch. One rat was black and the other one was white. The branch will fall on the ground very soon. The man then looked below again with fear and discovered that a big black snake had come and settled directly under him. The snake opened its mouth right under the man so that he will fall into it. The man then looked up to see if there was anything that he could hold on to. He saw another branch with a honeycomb. Drops of honey were falling from it. The man wanted to taste one of the drops. So, he put his tongue out and tasted one of the falling drops of honey. The honey was amazing in taste. So, he wanted to taste another drop and then another and as a result, he got lost into the sweetness of the honey. He forgot about the two rats eating his branch away, the lion on the ground and the snake that is sitting right under him. Suddenly when the branch broke he remembered all the dangers woke up from his sleep.
To get the meaning behind this dream, the man went to a pious scholar of Islam. The Islamic scholar who interpret the dream said, the lion you saw is your death. It always chases you and goes wherever you go. The two rats, one black and one white, are the night and the day. Black one is the night and the white one is the day. They circle around, coming one after another, to eat your time as they take you closer to death. The big black snake with a dark mouth is your grave. It's there, just waiting for you to fall into it. The honeycomb is this world and the sweet honey is the luxuries of this world. We like to taste a drop of the luxuries of this world but it's very sweet. Then we taste another drop and yet another. Meanwhile, we get lost into it and we forget about our time, we forget about our death and we forget about our graves." May Allah wake us up from the sleep and save us before it's too late. Ameen.
When our time is up, when we die, our second ticket is punched, signifying the end of our previous journey and the beginning of our next journey. This journey begins with our questioning in the grave, when we would be asked "Who is your Lord?" This would be the time many would not be able to respond correctly, except those who truly worshipped Allah in the dunya, during their lifetime. Only they would be able to answer that question correctly, may Allah make us all one of them insha Allah. So many things would happen in the second journey, the resurrection, the long wait for judgement day, the day of accountability, when no man would speak, when only the limbs of the body would speak except the mouth ('cos the mouth is full of lies). On this day, no man would remember his brother, no mother would remember her child. It is "every man for himself". All we are left with are our deeds and Allah's mercy.
Then finally, our final destination, be it Heaven or hell, which would depend on the deeds we've fort in this life. May Allah make us all inhabitants of Jannah (heaven) insha Allah. At this stage, our final ticket is punched, when we go to either Jannah (insha Allah), or Jahannam (wana'udhubillah).
So now it's up to us, while we are still alive, to choose between Jannah and it's bounties in which it's beauty no mind can comprehend and no ears have heard of, or Jahannam, in which the severity of the purnishment, of the blazing fire cannot be comprehended by the minds of any living being.
Allahumma Ajirna minan-naar, Ameen
