There was a 70-year-old man who had been a grave digger since he was 20 years old and had been working at the same cemetery. And during a funeral someone was told about the fact that this man had been there for so long, a younger person. And they went up and asked him, “In the fifty years that you’ve been doing this work, what is the most amazing thing you’ve seen here?”
And he responded that “With all the bodies that I’ve helped to bury and with all the death that I’ve seen, the most amazing thing that I’ve recognized is that this dog has not changed in face of all of that.” And therein lies the crux of our situation. We see everything that goes on around us and we talk about and we comment on it and we make criticism about it and we write about it and we sing about it, but do we do anything about it? Do we actually take hold of this dog and somehow put a leash on it, somehow put some kind of control on it?
It is said that you can’t have two masters. You have to decide who your master is, and the reality is that for most people, the master that we most have to fear is ourselves. We become that which drives us in all the wrong directions. We do everything on behalf of this dog that is full of all of the desires that are imaginable in the world and which constantly reacts to those desires.
So, our own desires become our masters. Our own desires become that which enslaves us. Our own desires are what we become subordinate to. Our own desires are what we surrender to.
The point being that in order to truly surrender to Allah, in order to truly make Allah our Master, we have to give up our slavery to our desire. And without giving up that surrender, we can never enter into the other surrender.
