Understanding Salat — Page 94
Understanding S al A t 94 that dream, the feeling of disappointment will also be very real and crushing. For example, many people go into mar- riage with unrealistically high expectations. Their infatu- ation makes them blind to each other’s reality. When that infatuation wears off, then their disappointment with each other often ends up causing the deterioration of the rela- tionship. Whether our expectation was a delusion or not is irrelevant. When we set ourselves up in a delusion, then we suffer the consequences of everything in our reality. The more unreasonable our expectations about S al ā t , the more of a disappointment we set ourselves up for. That feeling of disappointment can be so devastating that some people never recover and spend the rest of their lives in despair of trying to find Allah. Being mature in setting our expecta- tions is critical. It may be surprising that satan uses S al ā t to misguide believers, but this is exactly what the Holy Quran has described. It quotes satan as saying to Allah Almighty, I will assuredly lie in wait for them on Your straight path. (7:17) The second cause of despair is that when we overextend our- selves, we get tired of S al ā t itself. For example, if someone never exercises and then starts going to the gym every day for two hours, everybody at the gym can see that he’s going to begin to hate exercising, and then he’ll never be seen from again. It is obvious to our common sense that this approach