I asked the question with a heaviness I could not conceal: “Why is this happening to me?” I said. “What have I done to deserve it?”
He allowed the question to remain between us for a few moments, as though the assumption behind it needed to be examined before the event itself could be understood.
Then he asked quietly, “What makes you think that, in this life, people receive only what they deserve?”
I looked at him, surprised.
“Isn’t that how it works?”
“Not entirely,” he replied. “Some consequences in this life do arise from our own choices. But this world is not the place where every person receives the full reward or punishment they deserve. If it were, every good deed would receive its complete reward here, every wrongdoing would meet its full consequence here, and every moral account would be settled before death. But that is clearly not how this life has been arranged. The righteous may suffer, wrongdoers may prosper for a time, and children may experience hardships they did nothing to bring upon themselves. Final recompense belongs elsewhere.”
I sat quietly with that. Until then, I had not really questioned the assumption beneath my words. Something painful had happened, so I had instinctively looked backward, searching for the offense that might explain it.
He continued, “Before you conclude that a hardship is a punishment, ask whether you actually know why it has come. It may be a trial. It may be the natural consequence of a choice. It may interrupt a direction that would otherwise have harmed you. It may expose something you have been refusing to see.”
He paused before adding, “Or its full meaning may simply be something God has not made known to us.”
That possibility unsettled me. I had been so eager to explain the event that I had never stopped to ask whether I possessed enough knowledge to explain it at all. Something painful enters our lives, and the mind immediately begins searching for a reason. A plan fails. A relationship becomes strained. A decision produces an unwelcome consequence. Something we relied upon is suddenly taken away. Almost instinctively, we ask whether God is displeased with us, whether we are being punished, whether the hardship is the price of some mistake. There was something final about the way I had been thinking.
If this was punishment, then the verdict had already been delivered. The past had been judged, the consequence had arrived, and all that remained was to endure it under the weight of guilt.
He was asking me to leave room for another possibility. “Even when a difficulty follows something you have done,” he said, “why assume that its only purpose is to make you suffer?”
I did not answer.
“A consequence can hurt and still contain mercy. It may show you what comfort had allowed you to ignore. It may stop you from continuing in a direction that was slowly taking you farther away. It may wake you while there is still time to turn.”
I began to see the distinction. Punishment, as I had imagined it, looked only backward: You did this. Now you must pay. A reminder could also look backward, but only in order to make a different future possible: This is where you have been heading. Is this still where you want to go? That did not make the pain unreal. It did not mean that every difficulty could be neatly interpreted. But it changed the posture with which I stood before it.
He gave me an example. “Imagine a child walking toward a dangerous road,” he said. “The parent calls out, but the child continues. The parent raises his voice, runs toward him, and pulls him back sharply. The child may be startled. He may even experience the intervention as unpleasant. But what is the parent trying to do?”
“Protect him.”
“Exactly. The discomfort is not the purpose. The return is.”
It made sense. I began to wonder how often I had judged an interruption only by how it felt. If it disturbed me, I called it harmful. If it frustrated my plans, I assumed something had gone wrong. Yet perhaps some interruptions had stopped me from continuing in directions whose consequences I had not fully understood.
He was careful, however, not to let me turn that thought into another formula. “Do not conclude that every hardship means you have sinned,” he said. “And do not assume that every setback is a direct warning from God. Prophets were tested. Good people suffer. Some pain comes through the wrongdoing of others. Some comes through the ordinary conditions of life.”
“Then how am I supposed to interpret it?” I asked.
“With humility.”
I waited.
“You may not know why it happened. But you can still ask what it calls you to do now.”
That felt both more modest and more demanding. It was easier to give the event a label. If I called it a punishment, I could collapse into guilt. If I called it meaningless, I could collapse into resentment. But if I asked what response was now required of me, I had to become attentive. Perhaps I needed patience. Perhaps I needed to repair something I had damaged. Perhaps I needed to abandon a habit I had been defending. Perhaps I needed courage to endure something that was not of my making. Perhaps I needed to seek help, set a boundary, apologize, forgive, or simply accept what could no longer be changed. The event did not always tell me why it had happened. But it could still become a moment in which I examined where I stood and where I was heading.
He used an Arabic word. “Tanbīh,” he said.
“A warning?” I asked.
“A warning, yes. But also an alert. Something that wakes your attention.”
I thought about moments in my own life when events had forced me to see what ordinary comfort had concealed. There had been habits I knew were unhealthy but continued because their cost had not yet become visible. There were relationships I neglected because I assumed they would always remain. There were compromises I justified because nothing immediately seemed to follow from them. Then, at some point, something interrupted the pattern. At the time, I experienced mainly the discomfort. Looking back, I could sometimes see that the interruption had made honesty possible.
Not every painful event yielded such a clear lesson. Some remained difficult to understand. But even then, I began to see the value of refusing to waste the moment.
“If a consequence awakens you,” he said, “then the door has not closed.”
The sentence carried more hope than I expected. Even when I had contributed to my own difficulty, the story did not have to end with the mistake. There was still room to acknowledge, repair, and return. The consequence did not have to become the final definition of my life.
He then spoke of tawbah.
I had often understood repentance mainly as asking forgiveness after doing something wrong. He described it more fully.
“Tawbah means return,” he said. “You recognize that you have moved away from where you should be, and you turn back.”
There was movement in that understanding. Repentance was not remaining permanently before the past in shame. It was allowing what I had seen about the past to change the direction of the future.
“Then remorse has a purpose?” I asked.
“Yes. It should soften you, not imprison you. It should help you return, not convince you that return is no longer possible.”
I sat quietly with that.
Perhaps this was the difference between remorse that heals and guilt that destroys. One says, Something needs to change. The other says, You are beyond change. The first can become movement. The second becomes paralysis.
After a while, I asked the question that still troubled me: “But why must some reminders be so painful? Why can’t we learn through something gentler?”
“Sometimes we do,” he said. “But gentle reminders are easy to postpone.”
I knew immediately what he meant. There were truths I had understood for years without allowing them to alter my conduct. I had heard advice, felt unease, noticed warning signs, and still continued. Knowledge can remain abstract for a very long time. Sometimes a consequence makes what was abstract suddenly personal.
He was not glorifying suffering. He was not saying that pain was desirable or that we should passively accept every harmful situation. He was simply refusing to let pain become empty when it could become instructive. “The difficulty itself may not be good,” he said, “but something good may still be asked of you within it.”
That sentence gave me a more careful way to think. I did not need to call the hardship a blessing while I was still bleeding from it. I did not need to pretend that loss was pleasant or injustice acceptable. But neither did I have to assume that suffering had left me with nothing except suffering. There could still be a response.
He suggested a question: “When something difficult happens, do not ask only, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Ask also, ‘What is being asked of me now?’”
The first question searched for an explanation I might never receive. The second brought me back to a responsibility I could still fulfill. It shifted my attention from speculation about the hidden purpose of the event toward the moral possibilities that remained within the present moment.
I began trying to practice that. When a mistake produced an embarrassing consequence, I asked what needed to be repaired. When a plan failed, I asked whether the moment required perseverance, reconsideration, or acceptance. When I found myself repeatedly disturbed by the same pattern, I asked whether I had been refusing to notice something about myself. The answers did not always come quickly. Sometimes I discovered that I had indeed drifted. At other times, I realized that the hardship was not the result of anything I had done, and that my task was simply to endure it without surrendering trust, dignity, or compassion. Either way, the question helped me engage with the moment instead of merely passing judgment upon it.
Before we parted, he returned to the words with which we had begun. “You asked what you had done to deserve this,” he said. “Perhaps that is not always the question.”
“What is the question, then?”
He looked at me gently and said, “Will this bring you nearer—or will you allow it to take you farther away?”
I understood then that he was not offering me a complete explanation for suffering. He was giving me a way to stand within it. I could not always know whether a difficulty was a consequence, a test, a warning, or part of a wisdom I could not yet see. But I could refuse to let uncertainty drive me into despair or distance from God.
Sometimes the pain may expose a path from which I need to return. Sometimes it may ask me to remain faithful on a path I should not abandon. And sometimes its meaning may remain hidden while the response it requires becomes clear.
Now, when hardship comes, I try not to rush toward the conclusion that I am being punished. I pause before passing judgment upon the event—or upon myself. Perhaps this is not a door being closed. Perhaps it is a moment in which another door has quietly opened: the door of reflection, correction, patience, and return.
The question is no longer only: Why has this happened to me? It is also: What response will bring me nearer to God now?
