Empty your mind, then, for concern about what you have been commanded to do and do not preoccupy it with what has already been guaranteed for you. Provision and lifespan are inseparable twins, both assured: as long as your appointed term remains, your sustenance will arrive. If, by His wisdom, He blocks one of its avenues, He will—through His mercy—open for you another that is better and more beneficial.
Consider the state of the unborn child: its nourishment—blood—reaches it through a single channel, the umbilical cord. When it emerges from its mother’s womb and that path is severed, He opens two new channels and causes within them a purer, more delectable provision: perfectly wholesome milk. When the nursing period ends and those two avenues are closed by weaning, He opens four more perfect ways: two kinds of food and two kinds of drink—foods drawn from animal and plant, and drinks drawn from water and milk along with all that is blended with them of benefits and delights.
When the person dies, those four channels cease entirely, yet the Most High opens for him—if he is blessed—eight paths: the eight gates of Paradise, through any of which he may enter.
Such is the Lord, exalted is He: He never withholds from His believing servant anything of this world without granting him something better and more useful. This privilege is unique to the believer. Out of His bounty He deprives him of the base, paltry share and is not pleased that it should be his, so that He may bestow upon him the loftier, precious portion.
But the servant—because he is ignorant of his own true interests and unaware of his Lord’s generosity, wisdom, and gentleness—fails to see the difference between what has been withheld from him and what has been stored up for him. He is infatuated with the immediate, even though it is lowly, and shows little desire for the deferred, even though it is sublime.
If only the servant dealt justly with his Lord—though how seldom that occurs—he would realize that His favour in withholding from him the pleasures and comforts of this world is greater than His favour in granting him some of them; for