“I want to become the greatest man of my generation. I want to live in a house worth millions of dollars. I want to ride expensive cars of my time. I want to become the leader not the follower; to rule the world and control the universe. I want to be independent.”
The above statements are what you would find in the hearts of so many humans. These are the daily thoughts and ambitions of many creatures. So many people derailed from righteousness because of worldly gains; wealth, power, influence, and fame are on stipple chase with men.
We don’t remember often that everything we do is ‘vanity’: empty, futile, and short-lived. It doesn’t matter if you’re wise or a fool, ultimately, because everyone ends up dying.
Man was created by God and for God to fill him and be his content and reality. But today all men have lost God as their possession and they all have no real dwelling place!
All human beings are drifting about searching a home – man is wandering because he has lost God! God is our real dwelling place and our real possession! We need to see the real condition of the human life without God, as the Divine Book reveals it to us.
Every human being is filled with so many other things that he/she thinks will bring satisfaction and peace, but these things are the wrong content!
The true condition of the entire human life on earth without God can be summed up in one word, VANITY.
All the things in the human life are vanity – they are like pursuing after shadows and chasing after wind. The human life itself is short, fleeting, short-lived, and filled with labor and sorrow.
The strong ones among us live until 80-90 years old, but most people finish their course somewhere at the age of 70. If one lives on the earth, though he may live up until the age of eighty or ninety, if he lives without God, his life is filled with labor and sorrow – and the years fly away!
Why is it this way? Why all is vanity in the human life? It is simply because man was created for God, and man’s real satisfaction, man’s real peace, and man’s real pleasure is God Himself.
God is man’s blessing – but man has left God and was lost. Now all men try to fill their need for pleasure and satisfaction by doing things, accumulating things, being in relationships, etc – all these things are empty and even worse, they bring us in a bondage!
Allah says “the mutual rivalry for piling up (the good things of this world) diverts you (from the more serious things). Unitil ye visit the graves”.
May Allah compute our lives the way it will be easy for us here and hereafter.
Don’t be derailed!