16. STAY IN THE NICHE OF REPENTANCE EVEN IF THE SOUGHT COMFORT IS LATE
O sinner! If your skin started to feel the breeze of punishment, do not cry out loud and then say, “I have repented and am remorseful, so when will this punishment be removed?!” It is possible your repentance did not fulfil the required conditions and so was not accepted!
The period of punishment is too long, thus it cannot be avoided until it expires. The period of time between the disobedience of Adam and the moment he received the word of acceptance of his repentance was too long.
O sinner, remain patient because you will only be purified from the impurity that has debased your heart until after the waters of your eyes wash off the dirt from the garment of your heart; and the hands of remorse wringed it enough so that afterward you wash it over and over again.
Take the examples of Adam (‘alayhi as-salam) who remained in tears for three-hundred years for the sin he committed, and Ayyub (alayhias-salam) who suffered for eighteen years,131 and Ya’qub (’alayhi as-salani) who cried eighty years for the loss of his son Yusuf (‘alayhi as-salam).
While tests and hardships are meant to stay for a while then disappear, there is a possibility for a punishment to last until a person passes away. That being the case, stay in the niche of repentance (inabah), sit in the posture of a beggar, let apprehension be your food and tears be your drink so that maybe then, the bearer of glad tiding (of your repentance being accepted) arrives so you can rejoice just as Ya’qub rejoiced much to the point he had his eyesight returned.
If you remain in sorrow and die in the prison of your anxiety (hu-^n), maybe the anxiousness you suffered in this life relieves you from the anxiousness of the Hereafter, and that is indeed a great gain.
(Source: al-Hafiz Abu’l-Faraj ibn al-jawzl [d. 597AH] “CAPTURED THOUGHTS being” a translation of his masterpiece ‘Sayd al-K hatir)
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