Whenever people are around babies, the joy that the baby has becomes the joy for the whole room. Everybody wants to touch the baby, everybody wants to look at the baby, everybody wants to smile at the baby, and the baby smiles back at everybody else. A baby can make an entire room joyous.
Now, what’s the difference between babies and adults? Babies don’t carry the world. Adults carry the world, and because they carry the world, they think that they have to take care of the world. And all of these things in the world somehow have to be resolved.
There are many religious songs that say things like, “My life has changed since I put my burdens down.” A burden is like a mule, it carries a burden wherever it goes. You pack it, and it walks. Well, we’re like that. We put the world on our back and we think we have to carry it, and everywhere we go, we take it from here, to there, to everywhere, and it’s very heavy and we become sad. We feel like a donkey, we feel like everybody has put everything on our back.
But if you can transfer your problems to Allah, then you can unstrap all the burdens and drop them. But that’s only if you can give your problems to Allah, and Allah is ready to take them. Allah is ready to help you. Allah is ready to be your assist, but you have to let Him, and you have to believe that He can handle things.
The problem with man is he thinks he has to handle things himself, and he believes that he takes care of things himself. Especially very successful people with high IQs; they think they’re actually doing things. They think that they’ve taken care of things themselves. They don’t understand that everything is taken care of by God, and that whatever happens comes from God’s hands.
When you make that understanding, when you begin to believe that, the nature of your life changes, everything changes for you. You no longer feel the burden of having to resolve things and, more important, you no longer feel the blame that this has somehow happened because of something that you did. If you can relieve yourself of that self-blame, you can relieve yourself of the worry and all the difficulty that comes with it.
What goes on, very often, in people’s lives, is they carry burdens and they feel the responsibility to resolve those burdens. But the truth is, if everything is in Allah’s hands, Allah is going to resolve those burdens. To do that we need to change the way we think.
I practiced law for many years, and one of the things that I found was that when people came in with cases, and it was major conflict, you really couldn’t resolve the conflict right away because people weren’t ready to have the conflict resolved. So whatever alternative situation you gave them wouldn’t work because they didn’t want them to work. But, as the court process is slow, and people become frustrated with it, if a half a year goes by, and a year goes by, and a year and a half goes by, all of a sudden they’re ready to take almost any solution you can give them just to be done with it.
Well, our life is like that…
