One Is Better Than None

There's a lot of reasons why someone might not pray. Sometimes it's despair. Sometimes it's the weight of having not prayed, if that makes sense. It's like, well, I'm already not doing it. And I can't just go back or this kind of perfectionist mentality. If I go back, then I have to go back and do five times a day and like on time and all this other stuff, right? So this is a common trick of the shaytaan, where he gets us to, if even if the road is long, he gets us to focus on how long the road is. Right? He gets us to see how far the destination is. And we give up as opposed to breaking things down into micro steps, micro goals that are actually obtainable and sustainable. So this

recently happened, someone was asking me, he said, I haven't prayed, I'm feeling all these sorts of problems are actually having some serious issues. And the first question I asked is, did you pray? And I said, No, I said, Well, you know, maybe you should just start trying to do one a day and see how it goes. And that had literally never occurred to that person. And they tried it. And they were able to do it. They were able to do one a day. And sometimes they did two, sometimes they did three, right without me even asking that person. And they were surprised, right, the expectations that they had on themselves had been had become oppressive. Now, that same person, they made it 10 days in a

row. And then they had a lapse, right. Then there came a day, something really hard happened. They spent the day in bed didn't pray at all that day. And I was talking to them and they were like, I'm so bad. I can't do it. Like I'm such a quitter. And I said, Congratulations, you did 10 days in a row. That's great. That's such a big streak. Let's regroup and your tomorrow, you start your next streak, and we'll see if we can beat 10 days. And they were like, I never thought to look at it like that, you know, I was so fixated on what I'm not doing that it crushed me. And I wasn't paying any attention to the things that I that I was doing. Because when you put it like that, yeah, I did it

for like, first was like, You're right, like I didn't do it for 10 days, I would have before we had started talking, I would have never imagined that I could do it for 10 days in a row and look at what's possible. So that's one thing. And then the other thing. The other thing I think has to do with beliefs about Allah, anything that comes back to an issue, or I should say anything that starts with an issue of compliance often comes down to an issue of motivation. If you're not praying, praying as an expression of gratitude, it's something in your understanding or your lack of understanding or even perhaps your misunderstanding of Allah that is blocking you from feeling the

need to express that gratitude. So what is it is it that you don't understand who a lot is, is it that you haven't registered that debt upon you that you now have to are sort of obligated like literally and figuratively obligated to express your gratitude for maybe you have some misinformation or misconceptions about who a lot is and how this whole thing works. Maybe you feel entitled that it's your duty. There's a lot of different reasons, but many of them come back to a misunderstanding of who Allah is in the first place. If you understand who Allah is, and if you register, not just who he is, but also what he does. There's no There's no choice but to pray, or

you'll be embarrassed not to pray, but it's getting people up to speed to the point where they have that sort of knowledge of and relationship with a lot so that they get to that point.