Pain: A Blessing in Disguise

Early yesterday morning while I was working online, I received a rude shock: a virus sneaked into my system! Unlike their normal modus operandi - via emails and bursts of attacks online - this email came in through a message on Yahoo Messenger. Initially I was pleasantly surprised to receive the message. But as I was working and did not want to veer my attention, I left the message window open thinking of replying once the work was done. But horrors! The moment I pressed the 'Enter" key, the whole system went bonkers!

Multitude of windows suddenly sprung up; the cursor was irritatingly sluggish; various sounds - some unheard before - suddenly kept repeating themselves; and the screen was intermittently flashing red as though it was dancing to a John Travolta disco era music! After almost 5 minutes of indecisive actions, I decided to reboot the system.

Alhamdulillah, though the system was chugging heavy, I managed to activate one of the two antivirus software. What should have normally been a 5-minute operation, took almost 90 painstaking minutes to complete. But when it was done, the virus was contained sufficiently for me to activate the other a-v. And after a 15-minute battle, the virus was at last defeated leaving only several files as casualties. Otherwise, the whole system seem intact and operational. But what a pain it was.

Needless to say, I was fuming mad and angry at the episode, and was cursing the people who invented such inconvenience for other people. As my mind was conjuring the various and most inhumane torture methods on those virus inventors, I am suddenly reminded of a verse (cannot for the moment remember whether its Quranic or Hadith): Pain, even if its as small as the thorn, serves to expiate one of his sins and cause a rise in ranks.

MasyAllah! Allah the Most Beneficient and the Most Merciful, and He is the Most Compassionate. As strange and ironic it may seem, but pain - something which human as a whole try to distant ourselves - can, and is a 'method' which would help us to be closer to Allah. We are reminded - during those moments of agony - that we are nothing but His servant, and that we are helpless except that which He wills. It should go without saying that we, off course, have to readily accept His wills. That, I assure you - and ashamedly - try as I might, is a platform I have yet to attain.