Complacency is a great danger to the believer. When you are in a certain situation and you’ve been in that situation for a long time, you begin to think that you own that situation, that you deserve that situation, and that that situation belongs to you, and you become complacent as to that.
The fact that all of these things that you’ve been given in life, you begin to think somehow that you, yourself were the one who made these things happen, that you, yourself somehow created the situation that you live in.
It was your cleverness, your idea, your hard work, and all of this that you have is payment from your endeavor, and that is what complacency is. That is what taking for granted your situation is. That is what taking for granted what you have means.
And when you become, and when one becomes, complacent when one begins to take for granted the gifts that Allah has given to them, no matter how meager, and no matter how large, one loses their gratitude. And when one loses their gratitude, one changes their perception of reality.
Without gratitude it’s not that Allah gave this to me, and I am in debt to my glorious Lord for all that my glorious Lord has done for me. It’s more like: “Well, I set up the situation, I did these things, and I’m in this situation now, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We created it”. Well, we didn’t create anything, nor are we capable of creating anything.
We are capable of effort, but reward for effort is not in our hands. Reward for effort is granted as Allah wishes, and the fact that there has been reward for our effort is through the glory, and the mercy, and the grace, and the compassion of our Lord. He has seen fit to give unto us, and we, in turn, owe Him gratitude.
He doesn’t need any of the things that He gave us. He has an abundance beyond imagination. He has the ability to create beyond imagination. But what we do owe Him is our gratitude. Now, what does that mean, we owe Him our gratitude?
Well, it means He wants us to know Him, and through gratitude we connect to him. So it’s not a question of thanking Him for what He’s given to us, it’s a question of becoming closer to him because we understand that everything that exists came from Him, and that everything that we see came from Him, and that we are grateful for this gift of creation, for this gift of being, for this gift of existence, for this gift of having the consciousness that he gave us that can feel the immensity of what love is.
For having the gift of this consciousness that he gave us that can emulate the qualities that are his, and this is what gratitude is: gratitude is closeness. Because gratitude is not just the word and the meaning of the word, Shakur is also a name of Allah. So, in the act of being grateful we become closer to Allah and this is what he wants from us.
We are his secret, and he created us to be known but once we drift into a belief system that somehow what we have came through our creation, once we become complacent and begin to believe that we have creative powers and can create our own situation without His involvement, and His grace, then, what we do, is we do the opposite of gratitude. If gratitude is coming closer to Him, complacency and belief in self-doing is going further away from Him. So we commit the vilest of sin.
And what is the vilest of sin? To deny our Lord, and that, in fact, is what happens when we become the ones who believe that we are the arbiters of our fate, that we are the ones who create our fate, that we are the ones who make the situation for ourselves that we live in.
We need to break from these kinds of belief systems, and we need to be able to give all praise to our Lord. Now, these sayings like, “All praise belongs to Allah”, they’re words but they need expansion. They need understanding. They need to be alive within us.
So we can say “Subhan Allah”, “All praise to Allah” but what does it mean? It means that everything that exists is because of His will, everything that occurs is because of His will, every breath that we take is because of His will, every sound that we hear is because of His will, everything that we see is because of His will, everything that we touch is because of His will, every kindness done to us is because of His will, everything that we have is because of His will, every mercy that comes from us is because of His will, every mercy that comes to us is because of His will.
His will sustains and maintains all of existence, and without that there would be no existence, and He never pauses in this work of sustaining all of us. Because if He left for a micro-instant this would all disappear…
