Suhaib Webb – Anxiety & Paradise

Assalamu alaikum.

A

lot of anxiety going on these days, man.

Understandably so.

You know, anxiety is real. You find chapters

in the major books of Hadith about what

the process would say when he was anxious.

Sometimes people tell me does being anxious mean

I'm a bad person or I have weak

iman?

No, it means you care about things, means

you're awesome, Masha Allah, you have empathy.

And with that in mind, it's important to

understand theologically

that anxiety

is a necessary result

of a fragile world,

a temporary world.

The dunya. What is howadith?

I say that because I heard something that's

very transformative from my teacher about all of

this,

who, when we were memorizing the Quran some

years

ago, you know, he said to me, have

you ever paid attention that when Allah Subhanahu

Wa Ta'ala

talks about Adam and his wife being expelled

from paradise, he uses 2 different

type of words. I was like, what do

you mean? He's like,

Allah says that both of you are expelled

from paradise,

meaning our mother and our father, and Adam.

But then also there's this form,

all of you

are expelled from paradise. I was like, that's

true.

What does that mean? And he says, didn't

Allah take out all of the yet, the

offspring of Adam and asked him,

am I not your lord? And they said,

yes.

So he said, not only did Adam and

Hawa lose paradise,

we lost it.

So anxiety

also

at times can be a blessing

because it reminds

pushes us to look beyond all of the

comforts

and all of the joys that the temporary

world offers us

and allows us to see through our nature

that there is an abode

which truly has

sekinah, tranquility.

That there is an abode.

There is an abode that has no fear,

has no anxiety,

has no grief.

So oftentimes

anxiety

is a means of sparking our fitra,

our nature to remind us

the pain that our parents felt when they

left Jannah.

The anxiety they felt when they entered in

the dunya.

Thus, our anxiety is really our longing

for home.

Hope inshallah that brings some ease and peace

to your heart. And I wish you well.