Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | Speaking Tree Weekly Blog | May 31, 2021
When a man wishes to take possession of a beautiful rose, he may succeed if he rushes at it, seizes it by the stem and, with a mighty heave, tears it up by the roots. He will then have his rose, with half the petals missing, his hands will be torn and bleeding and, of course, the rose bush will never produce lovely blossoms again. Clearly, that is not the way to set about it. Obviously, he should protect his hands from the thorns, neatly snip off the stem with a pair of garden scissors, avoid doing damage to the plant, and see that his clothing does not become entangled in the bush. Anyone who has once had a bad experience trying to gather roses will obviously take all the necessary precautions on subsequent occasions. And he will have his lovely bouquet of roses, intact.
But it is astonishing how people fail to apply this God-given lesson to other situations in life. They understand that they are faced by certain problems, and they also understand the thorny nature of those problems, but they rush head-on at them, and try to grapple with them in the way of the man who mindlessly lacerates his own hands on the thorns of the rose. They allow themselves to become entangled, and they can see quite well that their own activities are verging on the destructive, yet they still feel that the “rose” is within their grasp, and that there is no turning back until they can triumphantly hold it aloft, albeit battered and petal-less.
When God has given us so many examples in nature of the necessity for patience, precaution and a circumspect approach, why is it that we still unthinkingly use demonstrably wrong tactics, act in haste, and fail to gauge the baneful results of our actions? We cannot, for example, achieve positive results by assembling huge crowds, making fiery speeches and issuing provocative statements. When God clearly wishes the reform of individuals and institutions to be carried out through quiet constructive activity, it will serve no useful purpose to launch agitations and create a general uproar.
We must accept the truth that the world we live in was not fashioned by ourselves, but by God. Although we have apparent freedom to act as we will, that freedom has been given to us only for the divine purpose of placing us on trial. The only way then for human beings to succeed in the conflicts of life–for conflict is an inherent aspect of earthly existence–is to cooperate with the divine scheme of things in a spirit of patience, tolerance and accommodation.