Don’t Let Sadness Overwhelm You

Welcome to “Amazed by the Quran”, a series in which I love sharing with you things I find amazing about the Quran.

Today, a small expression from the Quran that is an insight to depression and sadness. Allah Almighty says:

So do not weaken and do not grieve, and you will be superior if you are [true] believers. (Quran 3:139)

Don’t be weakened.

Wahan in Arabic is actually a feeling of not being able to exercise change. In other words, no matter what you do, things aren’t changing, things aren’t getting better… or your best attempts have failed and now you feel incapable of succeeding.

When that starts settling in like “Oh! My efforts have failed” or “I haven’t been able to accomplish”.

Then the next phase:

And then don’t be in a state of grief.

Sadness kicks in. you’ve become that bad, original paralysis, that original failure, it then leads you right into sadness.

So Allah Almighty doesn’t just say: “don’t be sad”. He actually went to the root cause. The root cause was some kind of failure, some kind of disappointment, that kind of wore you down and it started taking away your own confidence, your own belief that you can actually do better.

So Allah did this, by the way, one of the places He did this is in the Battle of Uhud, where Muslims suffered amazing and incredible amount of loss, but He turned that loss into something positive. He actually in the very next verse:

If you have been injured, then so what? The other side has been injured too. No toughen up, these are days that flip between people.

You are going to have easy days and you are going to have hard days. Don’t let this overwhelm you and just beat yourself up.

As a matter of fact, Huzn (sadness) is a state in which a person is actually torturing themselves. The sadness is when you’re beating yourself up. A situation beat you up, and you allowed yourself to get beat up on top of that.

Allah says don’t put yourself in that position:

You are going to be in the supreme position so long as you’re total believers.

In other words, these situations come and go but Allah is Constant, you never lost Allah, the One treasure that you don’t lose. Once you lose that, you lose everything and when you have that, nothing else counts, nothing else is a serious loss. So long as you have that, you are never ever going to be in a state where you need to be depressed.

May Allah make us of the people who don’t feel overwhelmed when facing failure.

May Allah make us of the people who can always stay away from the casting shadow of sadness that can take away all of the positive that we have in our lives.