As salaam alaikum Reader,

I pray this message finds you and your family well.

I was thinking about this thing of giving up....giving up on people, relationships, goals, dreams...

It is easy to think that we won't give up on our dreams. The advice to keep working and moving and trying resonates pretty easily. But what about giving up on people or relationships, that one is trickier. Because you see the common understanding is that you cannot want something for someone more than they want it for themselves. So in essence, you have to know that if they won't work for something, there is nothing you can or should do until the realization comes upon that person that they need to put the effort in to change their own situation.

However...

Everything in my womb says this just is not true. You see because if it was true, parents in general, and mothers in particular would have a job doomed to failure, and I don't believe that Allah set us up to fail.

Sometimes for the people you truly love, you have to fight for them when they don't even see that they are in a battle, because that is part of what love is. If you love someone you don't just leave them to their own destruction; at the very least of it, you make it as difficult for them to self-destruct as you can. Ultimately trusting that the outcome is with Allah, and Allah is the best disposer of affairs.

The challenge is knowing what stage of the game we are in and what form the fight should take when.

I believe that some of our fight is in our actions, what we do and allow; another portion of our fight is in our words, what we say or encourage; and the foundation of the fight starts in our hearts. It is painful to truly love someone, because those outside of our own selves are also outside of our control. However, love is the well from which action springs forth. I honestly think that we as a species are suffering under the weight of an enormous love deficit. Lack of love for God, and those He loves, and trying to fill it with love of self which just increases the emptiness because love is not meant to be insular. That's a topic for another time...

Back to the action part of it. You know those moments when people cry so hard their eyes are sore, pray so long their legs hurt, recite Quran until their voices are sore...pleading and beseeching with Allah because they are helpless in their situations ...in reality that is our constant state...in absolute need of God as the only one who can offer true assistance, help, and direction.

Please understand that prayers for people extend far beyond making a 30 second supplication that ends with an 'Amen' or 'Ameen'. Praying for people is attaching your love and devotion to God with your love and connection to His creation. When you combine those two energies, or when you bring the energy of human connection into conversation with submission to God, extraordinary things happen.

Children on their death beds, marriages on the brink of fracture, opportunities that seem to always be just out of reach...all, and things bigger and smaller can be healed with prayer.

Prayer is love in action.

So please, no matter what you may be going through, know that 'giving up' is never the answer. The only answer is always to hand your affairs over to the same God who gifted you the opportunity to feel helpless in your situation so that you would seek help from He that has power of all things.

Important note...it's not about things working out the way you want, but its about increasing your submission to the one in whose hands is the decree, so that His desire is your desire and you live out the ways in which you are written to serve those He has put in your life. We are all a part of the decreed provision of others. A portion of our love, our prayers, our time, our energy, our striving...written to be executed in the service of others through the action of love through prayer as foundational to our relationships. It's a beautiful and blessed realization.

With Love,

Wa salaam alaikum

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Reminders & Opportunities

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