Time is ticking.

Look around you – it isn’t hard to identify patterns eventhough there was a time when none of these things existed, neither time nor creation. Then BANG! And now, everywhere we look, we see Allah’s creation. We see constancy in the alteration of day and night, winter and summer, life and death, rising and falling of tides, regrowth of vegetation, migration of animals, and we even see a pattern in global warming.

Look around you – patience is evident in the mating periods of animals, in the slow and steady growth of food, in the nurture of young, in shelter from storms.

Look around you – you will find perseverance in the cat that keeps coming back until you eventually give in, the birds that endure hardships to reach their nesting areas and then exercise both patience and perseverance while they lay on their eggs despite hunger and foul weather, in the salmon that exerts enormous amounts of energy to swim upstream only to lay their eggs and die.

Yet, time is ticking.

There will come a time when – DONG! – just like that, time as we know it, will stop. Yet we will continue in a way that is beyond our knowledge and in this we have faith – just as we have faith that the world existed in some form we were unfamiliar with at one point in its creation.

Now, take away the 10 or so years it takes for children to reach an age where they are no longer as dependent on caregivers and assume you have another 60 or so years to live, is that really all that much time? It feels like a long time but if we compare that to the millions of years it takes for mountains to form, 60 years would be shorter than the blink-of-an-eye.

So, life really is a race and a short one at that. How much time are we devoting for what is to come? Are we preparing at all?

Please, come, let’s struggle towards falah together.

Surah ‘Asr

 In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

1. By (the Token of), Time (through the Ages),

2. Verily Man is in loss

3. Except such as have Faith, and do righteous deeds, and (join together) in the mutual teaching of Truth, and of Patience and Constancy.