One morning I spent an hour watching a tiny ant carry a huge feather across my back stoep. Several times it was confronted by obstacles in its path and after a pause it would make the necessary detour. At one point the ant had to negotiate a crack in the concrete about 10mm wide. After brief contemplation the ant laid the feather over the crack, walked across it, picked up the feather on the other side then continued on its way.
After some time the ant reached its destination - a flower bed and a small hole that was the entrance to its underground home. It was here that the ant finally met its match. How could that large feather fit down a small hole? Of course it couldn't. So the ant, after all this trouble and exercising great ingenuity, overcoming problems all along the way, abandoned the feather and went home.
The ant had not thought the problem through before it began its epic journey and in the end the feather was nothing more than a burden.
Isn't our life like that? We worry about our family; we worry about money, we worry about work, about where we live, about all sorts of things at the expense of pleasing Allah. These are all burdens - the things we pick up along life's path and lug around the obstacles that life will bring, more often than not violating Allah’s Commands, only to find at the end they are useless and we can't take them into the hole that is our grave. These are necessary things that should not be made the focus of our life so much that we prepare nothing for the real life.
The Feather
