Smile, Though Your Heart is Aching..

Assalamualaikum :)..

I had this discussion with a brother bout the issue of sabar and redha. He told me, there's this story from a friend of him (which he of course, made the name classified), which he claimed to be true. He told me how the guy fell in love with a girl (well..another one of those stories). How he struggled to keep the feelin towards himself, and tried to do the right thing; not to express his so-called love till d rite time comes (which i thought to get married..i dunno, jz my concern..heh).

Then one day, when he felt dat the 'day' for him to express his feelin is still faraway, and he couldn't hold it anymore, he broke his silence. He didn't ask for being a partner for the girl, as he knows a bit of Islam. How Islam controls pre-marriage male-female relationship. He just expressed his concerns towards the girl. The girl rejected him politely, saying dat she needs time to focus on her study and whatsoever the reasons. This pitiful guy took d words bit by bit, and didn't consider it to be a rejection. The guy continued his life, while still keeping the hope for the girl. Typical short-sighted teenagers.

Til one day, he found out that the girl is actually with someone else. The dual-frustration, of being lied to and being rejected, haunted him. And the mixed feelings he felt when the girl actually fell into this 'trap' of life for youngsters, 'couple'. He tried his best though to forget the misfortune event. But you see, it's not an easy feat. As we can't see any 'delete' button inside us to easily forget things that we don't wanna remember. So, the thorny journey begins.



Fortunately for him, he didn't do anything stupid to channel his frustration. He, shockingly enuff, tried to recover by getting as much knowledge as he could. The knowledge of life, the knowledge of Islam itself. We humans tend to forget the Almighty when we're in a situation where we feel comfortable (refer my previous post, 10 minutes, where I stated that our comfort is also a test for us). The question of whether or not he succeed, I dunno, neither the brother who told me the story. But there's a thing or two we can learn from this study case :).

1) Patience

Imam Al Ghazali, in his book, Ihya' Ulumuddin, explain patience = to endure all physical hardship. Be it Muslim or non-Muslim, everyone will be tested to see the level of his patience. Anger, frustration, sadness, you name it, even happiness, all these will stretch our limit of patience. Especially for Muslims, which Allah has stated in His Holy Book,

" Do people think that they will be left alone because they say: "we believe," and will not be tested?" - Holy Quran 29:2

Allah has promised to test us, as a prove of our Iman. I remembered from a kuliah I heard. "You can judge your level of patience when you look at yourself when the misfortune befalls you. Not 10 years afterwards, but what's your immidiate respond towards the event".

This, brings us to the second topic.

2) Redha (sorry dunno what it's called in English :p)

I can't recall the exact formal meaning of redha. But from my limited knowledge and understandings, redha (as in us) is the optimism, the husnu zhon, to think positively to Allah and react accordingly. When we talk bout redha, we can't escape from talking bout Qada' and Qadar. Everything has been set for us. Allah knows the best.

Let's take example from our case study above. Let say, that guy choose to forget the girl totally, in order to please himself, to get rid the sadness and frustration. Let say the guy said, "well, I accept what's just happened. Redha je la. lupekan je". Is this really what redha means? For us to accept things according to our will, when something went wrong? This method only work if the girl isn't meant to be for him.

What if the exact girl is meant to be for him? To be his wife, while he had seed this hatred inside him in order to forget her. This kind of twist of event isn't impossible, Allah knows best. By that time, will he be redha to accept the very girl he tried hardly to forget? This is what Allah said in his glorious book:

"Jihad is ordained for you though you dislike it, and it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. Allah knows but you don't" - Holy Quran 2:216

Though the context of the ayah is to encourage Muslims for jihad, look at the next statement from Him. We may hate something meant to be good for us, and vice versa. Allah knows the best, while our not so long-sighted views of life, knows not. Redha is to readily accept what is offered to us. As we don't know what is prepared for us, it's unwise just to wait for the 'rezeki' to fall, rather we must work for it.

We asked from Allah to be strong physically, mentally and emotionally. But do we work on that?
What kind of effort have we shown?
To be strong physically, there must be work out to be done..
To be strong mentally, there must be knowledge seeking going on..
To be strong emotionally, are we going to runaway from our problems and just pray be granted a strong and stable emotions?

About the study case (story above), I don't know how much of it is true. Hopefully he didn't make that up. The more important thing to me is, the lesson learnt from the story. Sometimes, we should put ourselves in others shoes to at least gain a bit of understanding of life.

I don't know where I heard this, but there're sayings regarding to this matter. Roughly it goes like this:

He is a wise man, who learnt from his experience.
He is even wiser when he learnt from others.

Jz sharing my 2cents.

Cheers :D