I still remember sitting with him that afternoon, feeling frustrated about the things in my life that weren’t moving the way I had hoped. He listened quietly, letting me speak until my words slowed down. Then he asked gently, “Can I show you something?”
I nodded.
“There are two ways God stops a person from something,” he said. “One: He directly tells you not to do it. Two: He simply does not give you the resources to pursue it.”
I frowned slightly. “But in both cases, I feel stuck.”
“That’s exactly the point,” he replied. “Whether He says ‘don’t do this’ or He withholds the means, the outcome is the same—He has kept it away from you. The real question is: Where will your attention go now?”
He reached for two small pieces of paper. On one he wrote: What I Have. On the other: What I Don’t Have. He placed them in front of me and asked, “Which one does your attention naturally go to?”
I stared for a few seconds. My eyes kept drifting to the second paper. He smiled softly. “This,” he said, “is where your gratitude begins to weaken.”
He leaned forward slightly. “Gratitude and complaint are opposites. They can’t exist in the same heart together. If a complaint enters, gratitude leaves. Think about it—you might live in a beautiful home, but your mind keeps circling around that one room that is not to your liking. Or you might have loving people around you, but the only voice you hear is the one that criticizes you.”
His words felt uncomfortably familiar.
“And do you know,” he said, lowering his voice, “that this was the oldest trick of Iblis?”
I looked at him, curious.
“He didn’t tell Adam and Eve to look at the countless blessings they had. He pointed only to the one tree they were told not to go near.”
He tapped the paper with What I Don’t Have.
“That’s how he works—simple, effective, ancient. And he still works through the same trick today. Sometimes the voice comes from people around us. Sometimes from social media. Sometimes from inside our own hearts. It whispers: ‘Look at what you’re missing… look at what God hasn’t given you.’”
I felt a quiet heaviness inside me. He noticed. “I once guided someone,” he continued. “She would say, ‘I have so many blessings, but my heart never settles.’ I asked her to write three blessings every day—but with one condition: she couldn’t mix gratitude with complaint.”
He smiled as he remembered it. “A few days later, she came back and said, ‘I wrote: My home was peaceful today… but then I added: except for my husband’s attitude.’ She realized she wasn’t doing gratitude—she was doing complaint in the language of gratitude.”
He looked at me meaningfully. “Many people do this. They say ‘Alhamdulillah,’ but the heart is narrating a complaint.”
I lowered my gaze.
He asked softly, “Do you know what God wants from you at the moment He withholds something?”
I shook my head.
“He wants you to look at what you have, not at what you don’t. That simple shift changes everything.”
“That’s harder than it sounds,” I admitted.
“Of course,” he said. “Because your inner focus has been trained—maybe for years—to find the empty spaces rather than the beauty already present.”
He handed me a pen. “Try something today. Write down two things you have. And just for a few moments, don’t allow your mind to wander toward what is missing. You’re not just writing blessings—you’re retraining your attention. And where your attention goes, your emotional state follows.”
I could feel something shifting. Not a dramatic transformation, but a small clearing inside, like dust settling.
Before I left, he said something that has stayed with me: “God’s withholding something from us isn’t rejection. Sometimes it’s protection. Sometimes it’s timing. Sometimes it’s preparation. And sometimes… it’s a gift you only understand later.”
He looked once more at the two pieces of paper and said, “Your life will change when your attention changes.”
And for the first time, I realized something simple yet profound: Gratitude isn’t about what I have—it’s about what I choose to notice.
