The Blessings of Pain

[Shaykh Aaid Al-Qarni]

Pain is not always a negative force and it is not something that you should always hate. At times a person benefits when he feels pain.

You might remember, that at times when you felt a lot of pain, you sincerely supplicated and remembered Allah.

When he is studying, the student often feels the pangs of heavy burden, sometimes perhaps the burden of monotony, yet he eventually leaves this stage of life as a scholar. He felt burdened with pain at the beginning but he shined at the end.

The aches and pangs of passion, the poverty and the scorn of others, the frustration and anger at injustices - these all cause the poet to write flowing and captivating verses.

This is because he himself feels pain in his heart, his nerves, and in his blood, and as a result, he is able to infuse the same emotions into the hearts of others.

How many painful experiences does the writer undergo, experiences that inspire brilliant works, works that posterity continues to enjoy and learn from.

The student who lives the life of comfort and repose and who is not stung by hardships, or who has never been befallen by calamity will be an unproductive, lazy, and lethargic person.

Indeed, the poet who knows no pain and who has never tasted bitter disappointment will invariably produce heaps upon heaps of cheap words - absolute humdrum. This is because his words pour forth from his tongue and not from his feelings or emotion, and though he may comprehend what he has written, his heart and body have not lived the experience.

More worthy and relevant to the aforementioned examples are the lives of the early believers, who lived during the period of revelation and who took part in the most important religious revolution that mankind has seen.

Indeed, they had greater faith, nobler hearts, more truthful tongues, and deeper knowledge: they had all of these because they lived through the pain and suffering that are necessarily concomitant to great revolutions.

They felt the pains of hunger, of poverty, of rejection, of abuse, of banishment from home and country; of abandonment of all pleasures, of the pains of wounds and of death and torture.

They were in truth chosen ones, the elite of mankind. They were models of purity, nobleness, and sacrifice.

"That is because they suffer neither thirst nor fatigue, nor hunger in the Cause of Allah, nor they take any step to raise the anger of disbelievers nor inflict any injury upon an enemy, but is written to their credit as a deed of righteousness. Surely, Allah wastes not the reward of the doers of good."
[surah At-Taubah – Ayah 120].