A temporary loss of health is one
of the great blessings Allah Almighty enables his servants to experience.
When one falls ill, all worldly engagements involuntarily come to a standstill
-- engagements about which man normally imagines that they are unavoidable.
Man comes to realise that after all he is not indispensable for the world,
nor the world is indispensable for him. While a person is ill, he doesn’t
enjoy the food and the drinks he normally does as a healthy person. It
gives him a reason to thank Allah for the numerous blessings He has made
available to him, as also the accompanying abilities with which he can
properly benefit from them.
When illness gets more acute, one
gets a real feeling of rubbing one’s shoulders with death. Thus one realises
that death is a serious possibility. It is this experience that actually
enables one to genuinely realise the folly of one’s over-involvement in
the unnecessary worldly pursuits. The weakness of one’s body and the acuteness
of illness all help in realising that when it will come to the time of
departure from this world, no one will be able to come to the rescue of
the departing soul. This near-death experience is indeed needed by all
of us. And indeed it comes to our service on a fairly regular basis. How
very unfortunate then that despite going through as thorough an experience
as that of illness, we still find our worldly life so absorbing that we
do not spare time to ponder seriously about our life-after-death?
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