by Imam Abdurrahman Sahin from Keysborough Turkish Islamic & Cultural Centre
“With every difficulty there is also an ease; Come on, don’t give up hope!” (Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi)
As always, we are going through difficult times.
Just like how all difficulties we face have an end, what we experience and live through our day-to-day lives will also come to an end.
The important thing is to be ready on the day these difficulties end.
Are we preparing ourselves for the day when these hardships end?
Let’s not worry. With our past experiences we can come out of these difficulties successfully.
History also bears witness to this.
The very first and important step we need to take is to believe, because believing is halfway to success.
To believe is to know yourself.
To believe is to know that our existence and other things have a meaning and purpose.
The other important thing for us to succeed today and in the future is to have hope and be hard working.
When there is no hope in one’s life, there is a loss of belief, and the purpose of life becomes less meaningful.
Even if there was no hope in the past it does not matter because hope is about being focused on the present and future.
To hope means to always be ready for what has not yet come, it’s to start preparing.
However, if growth and development do not occur in our lifetime, we should not be careless and never fall into despair.
Hope consists of thinking, planning and research.
In order for us to action our hopes, we need to realize that it’s there.
Working and taking action toward what we hope for and believing in having hope is not just a dream, it can come true.
Because of this, hope and work should go together.
Hope and work are about actually wanting.
It means about wanting to find new ways to fulfill your desires and to never give up.
We can see the difficulties as a stepping-stone to further develop our human civilization and our existence on earth.
Once we overcome the sufferings and troubles we face, this should lead towards gaining new hopes, success and happiness.
There are and always will be hardship and this is something one would always struggle with.
But we are experiencing these difficult times now.
It is now our turn to show the new generations how to overcome these challenges with faith, hope and hard work.
Hope is not sitting and waiting but shrugging and taking action.
We will either lose our hope and get carried away in the face of difficulties, or we will resist these difficulties and grow hope.
