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*This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. *
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My brothers and sisters, second advice is to be thankful, is to express gratitude. How many people here? When you go home, you know that there is going to be a good tasty hot meal ready for you. Yes? Who cooks your, who cooks the meal? You? Your dad or your mom? Fantastic. Who cooks the meal for you? Your mom, alright. The older ones? Who cooks the meal? Your wife. Now let me ask you a question. How many of you thank your mom and say thank you very much for this food? How many of you thank your wife? You thank your wife? You understand what I am saying? It’s very important to thank. And that is why Rasoolullah SAS said, The one who has not thanked Allah, who has not thanked the people. The one who has not thanked the people, has not thanked Allah. Sometimes we feel, oh but why do I have to say thank you, thank you, thank you all the time? Don’t they know? Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala said in surat Ibrahim, Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala said, the announcement was made and said to them that, the one who thanks me, I will increase my blessing. So if you say about your wife or about your mother, why do I need to thank, why do I need to thank my dad? Doesn’t he know? But doesn’t Allah know? Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala said, Who knows me is the best of all. He even knows what’s in your heart. So why is he saying the one who thanks me, I will… Why? Because he doesn’t know? Allah is showing us that to thank Allah, to thank is our job. It’s not because they know or they don’t know. To thank is my position as the recipient of the blessing that I must thank. Whether the other person knows or does not know is not my concern. My concern is I must thank. So make this an absolute wonderful thing for yourself and say I will thank. Gratitude is a fantastic thing. They did a study in the University of California with people, patients of chronic depression. So these are people on anti-depressant medicine and they are like suicidal almost. They are so deep into depression. The experiment they did was the control group, they gave them what they call the gratitude diary. They gave them a notebook and they said every morning when you wake up, write down 10 things that you are grateful for. 10 things. And they said you can write the same 10 things every day, doesn’t matter, but write 10 things. So for example, I am grateful that I have eyesight. Do we think about this sometimes? Did you thank Allah, say, Alhamdulillah, I have eyesight? Did you say, Alhamdulillah, when I stand up, get up from my bed and I go to the bathroom, I am not… I can walk steadily, I don’t fall down? We don’t even think about that because Allah is made us strong. But you know this is a major problem, you know this is a problem which if you live long enough when you get older, this is one of the first things that happens to you, you lose balance. Doctors who do geriatric care, doctors who care for elderly people, you know what they tell them? They say do whatever you want but don’t fall. Don’t fall, make sure you don’t fall. So don’t try and… When you put on your trousers, don’t stand and put… sit down, sit down and then put your trousers on. Don’t stand. You say, I did it all my life. Yes, all your life you did that, but all your life you were not 70, you were not 80. Now you are 70 and 80. Sit down. Do not fall. Don’t stand and wear your shoes. Sit down and wear your shoes. Yes? So when you are now in a stage where you are not 70 and 80, Abdullah you are strong, you can stand on one leg and do stuff, should you not thank Allah for this? We race up and down stairs because the knees are good. You live long enough, a day will come when arthritis will come. And with arthritis the cartilage in the between the knees, between the… in the joint will go. And then you have bone on bone. Should we not thank Allah? Alhamdulillah, my knees are okay. Alhamdulillah, my hands are okay, my knuckles are not painful. I can hold, I can catch, I can write. I was once in the post office in Massachusetts. And a very old woman came in, she’s walking with a walker, and her hands were like this. These fingers were bent backwards almost like this, with arthritis, severe arthritis, like this. She can’t hold anything, with great difficulty she’s walking like this. And she came into the post office with a bag which had very badly wrapped packages. And these were cards and packages she was sending Christmas gifts to her children. So I helped her to, you know, wrap it and to post it. And I said, where are your children? She said, in different places in America. I said, where do you live? She said, I live in a… there’s an old people’s home, she lives in the home. But still she’s a mother, so even though the children dumped her into an old people’s home and they are living somewhere, she comes to send them gifts. Right? Should we not thank Allah that our fingers, hands, everything is fine? Thank consciously to that. Thank people. The people who help us, our parents help us. Why should the parent help you? Why should a parent help you? We take things for granted. I’ve got a fancy phone, right? I mean, I see a whole bunch of these kids, they’ve got… Who gave you the phone? Your father? Your mother? I remember just seeing an interview with Ronaldo, you know Ronaldo? The football player, right? Soccer player. Ronaldo says that my son is prohibited from… he doesn’t have a phone. We do not give him a phone. We don’t give him any screen. And we have prohibited him from being on social media. He said one day I discovered that he took somebody else’s phone and he secretly created an Instagram account and in literally 24 hours he had 1 million viewers. He said I forced him to delete that account. They asked him why. He said because he is getting 1 million viewers because of me, not because of him. Nobody cares for that kid. Who’s that kid? They say that kid is Ronaldo’s son, therefore he has value. He said he must stand on his own feet. He has to know what it means to become a celebrity. He has to go through the mill. If he does not do the hard work, he is going to fail. He said I am afraid for my son because my son has at his age so much wealth and so much luxury that he has no value for it. He said I lived in a room, my mother and me, with one mattress on the floor. There was not even any chair and table in that room in Portugal. We came up through life like that. It struggled. So now when you have parents who are helping you through that, should you not thank them? Should you not serve them? Be thankful. Third piece of advice, forgiveness. Forgive each other because forgiveness heals. Don’t forget but forgive. If you forget then you will lose the lesson. You know the example I give is, for example if you are driving, say you have a lovely Harley and you are driving this Harley on the highway and somehow you get behind a garbage truck and a piece of garbage flies off the truck and hits you on your shirt, on your jacket. And it’s a stinky piece of garbage. What will you do? Yeah? You’d throw it off, right? You’d pull up at the nearest convenience place where you can safely stop and you would wash it off immediately, yes? You’d pull over, right? And then you would wash it off. How about this? Instead of that, how about you rub it in nicely into your jacket and you are still driving, it’s stinking and every once in a while you bend down, you smell it, aish, oof. If you do that, what will happen? What does it say? You say you are crazy. Why are you doing that? Yes? Because you are saying, poor, poor, the garbage man for picking up your trash. So you don’t ever smell this thing, no, on your shirt? It is crazy, you would never do that. You would never keep the dirt on your shirt, you won’t rub the dirt in, you won’t keep on smelling the dirt again and again. Then why do you do that with what people do? Why do you do that when somebody said something bad to me, now I feel bad about that and I’m feeling bad about that one year later and ten years later and I’m thinking that constantly, you know what that man told me? You know what that woman told me? How could she do that? How could he do that? Why? It’s garbage, get rid of it. Learn the lesson, don’t ride behind a garbage truck again. That’s the lesson to learn. If you forget it, you will get behind a garbage truck again, don’t do that. Make sure you learn the lesson, but forgive, clean it. And that’s why I say forgiveness eliminates enemies, not forgiving eliminates friends. So decide who you want to eliminate. Never compromise your legacy. That’s why I began with our purpose. Anytime you have a doubt, ask yourself, why am I here? I’m here to obey Allah. I’m here to establish and demonstrate the beauty of Islam. I’m here to establish and demonstrate the beauty of Islam. So how can I do something which goes contrary to that? So write down your purpose. What is my purpose in life? Write it down. Nice big thing, a poster, stick it to the wall. Look at it every morning. Ask yourself, what do I want to be remembered for? If I die today and you are thinking about me next week, following week, year later, what do I want you to be thinking? Do that. I remind myself, I knew that people remember us not by what we consumed, but by what we contributed. Finally everybody needs friends, right? Friends are important. So who are good friends? This is the meaning of a hadith Rasool Aswassal mentioned this. A good friend is one who reminds you of Allah and he reminds you to obey Allah. So a good friend is one that you can look up to, that you admire and you want to be like them and you want to learn something from them. A good friend is one who challenges you to be your best. And a good friend is one who tells you what you need to know, what you need to hear, not only what you want to hear. A good friend is one if you are doing something wrong, he tells you, say don’t do this. Not someone who constantly only praises you. That’s why I say nobody walks alone. Everyone is a reflection of their family, their community, of the Ummah. And that’s why I always remember that. So if you do something wrong, for example if you go and park your car across somebody’s driveway or illegally park it in somebody’s place, you are not going to say this car, See this is how Muslims are. Muslims are like this. You owe somebody something you don’t pay, they will say Muslims don’t pay their bills. Yes? So by my action I am bringing a good name or a bad name to Rasulullah A.S. So ask, remind yourself and say is that what I want? If I bring a good name, Alhamdulillah, but if I am bringing a bad name to Rasulullah A.S., is that what I want to do? Character is the tree and fame is its shadow. Only the tree is real. So don’t worry about how many followers you have on Facebook or how many YouTube videos you have or how many you know, ticks on Twitter or Instagram or whatever, doesn’t matter. How many people are clapping for you makes no difference. You know your reality. Focus on that and try and make sure that there is always better. And that’s why they say the golden rule is do unto others what you want them to do unto you, right? And I say the platinum rule, that’s the rule of Islam is do to others better than what you have them, that what you would have them do to you. Rasulullah A.S. said do good to the one who harms you. Not only to the one who does you good. Do good. He said give people who deny your rights, give them their rights. This is Islam. This is Islam. It’s not easy. Jannah is not easy. But Jannah is Jannah. If it is worth getting it, then we have to do that. And that’s why I say people listen with their eyes. They don’t care what you say until they see what you do. That is why every time people tell me, you know, we need to inculcate this and that in our youth, I say no. We need to inculcate that same this and that in ourselves. Your children are a reflection of you. If you have well behaved children with Adab, that is who you are. That is because you have Adab. If your children are behaving without Adab, it means that you have no Adab. The child is learning from you. Who else will he learn from? You might say, you know, the child goes to school, public school. No, no, no, he doesn’t learn from you. He learns from you. Because he goes to public school, he learns something there, he comes back home and compares it mentally with what he sees in the house. If what he sees in the house is the same thing, then he will go that way. But if he sees something in the school and he comes home and he sees the opposite of that, he will stop, which I know something is wrong. This is not how my father behaves. This is not how my mother behaves. I am seeing here people are using foul language and profanity and cursing and so on and so on, but in my house people don’t curse. My parents talk to me respectfully. So I should be respectful. You don’t have to say anything. Children learn with their eyes. They listen with their eyes. Today we live in a world where we are told that popularity is everything. You should be popular. Giving two examples. How many of you heard this name, Dr. Rene Favaralo? Nobody, right? This is the guy who invented bypass surgery. How many of you don’t know what is bypass surgery? Anyone in this room who had bypass surgery? No? I am going to vote for you. So once again these are things which happen. Michael Jackson, everybody heard of you, right? Between the two of Rene Favaralo and Michael Jackson, who is more popular? Michael Jackson. But who is more useful to mankind, to people, to the world? So it’s not a question of how popular you are. The question is how valuable is your contribution to life, to the world? And that’s why I say it’s not how much you know, but how much you do that makes the critical difference. Finally, be kind because Rasulullah Sada Salaam said, kindness and gentleness adds beauty to whatever it is founded. Kind language, kind speaking, kind behavior, gentle behavior adds value wherever it is. Kindness is the field in which you have the least competition, unfortunately, in this world. You will become hugely influential if you are kind. If you are nice to people, people will love you and they will listen to you and that is power. And I think that’s the last slide. In the end, it’s not about them, it’s about us.
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