The greatest epiphany of my life

I need to bring you inside that moment because I think a lot of you are carrying what I was carrying and you don’t even know it.

It started with Omar. He asked me a question. He said, if Allah just removed all the stress and the cortisol from your life, what would you be like. And without thinking I said, a Zen master. Calm. Present. Unbothered. And then we started unpacking why that man doesn’t already exist in my daily life. Why he only shows up in glimpses.

Then Omar brought up this hadith.

The Prophet ﷺ said: if the Hour is about to be established and one of you has a seedling in his hand, let him plant it.

I’ve heard that hadith before. I thought I understood it. I didn’t.

Omar said, think about what’s actually happening in that moment. The man holding that seedling knows the world is ending. He knows that seed will never break soil, never become a sapling, never produce fruit. The ground is about to be swallowed. And still the instruction is to plant it.

Why…

Because the planting was never about the outcome. It was always about the action.

I sat with that after our call. I mean I really sat with it. And something cracked open that I don’t have the words to fully describe except to say I felt the weight of something leave my body that I have been carrying my whole adult life.

I have been carrying the tree.

The future of SOS after I’m gone. Whether these books I’ve written ever reach the men who need them. Whether the stronghold survives me or outlives me or crumbles the day I’m no longer here to hold it together. I have been gripping all of that like it was mine to manage. Like the outcome was my responsibility. Like if I didn’t control what happened next then I had somehow failed in what I was supposed to do.

I’m ashamed to say, that’s a man who doesn’t trust the division of responsibility between himself and Allah.

And then I started thinking about the seed itself. Not as a symbol. Literally. Scientifically. An acorn, which is the seed of an oak tree, already contains the complete DNA of the full grown oak before it ever touches soil. The root system. The bark. The height it will reach. The acorns it will eventually produce itself. Every single thing that tree will ever be is already written inside that shell. The soil doesn’t create the tree. The water doesn’t create the tree. The sun doesn’t create the tree. They’re just the conditions that allow what’s already encoded to express itself in physical form.

The oak was always the truth of the acorn.

So in the most real and complete sense, the acorn is already the tree. It just hasn’t unfolded in time yet. The completion is already in it before a single root breaks through.

Now hear me when I say this.

SOS is the seed. What I’m doing today is the seed. These books sitting on my hard drive are the seed. And everything that those seeds will eventually become is already encoded in what we’re doing in this moment. I don’t need to see the tree to know the tree is real. The blueprint is already written. My job was never to grow the tree. My job is to plant with everything I have and open my hand.

The tree was always Allah’s business.

I can not tell you how humbling that is. I can not tell you how relieving it is to finally understand at 53 years old, after 34 years of this deen, after all the miles and the sacrifice and the community wounds and the years on the road away from my family, that the outcome was never mine to carry. It was never on my shoulders. I picked it up and walked with it like it was and the weight of that almost broke something in me that wasn’t supposed to break.

Not anymore.

What’s mine is today. This post. The meetings. This conversation. This seed in my hand right now. Whether I’m alive or dead, whether this community has 300 men or 3000, whether my name is remembered or forgotten, none of that is my jurisdiction. My jurisdiction is what I do right now with what’s in my hand.

That’s it. That’s the whole job.

The man in that hadith didn’t negotiate with the moment. He didn’t look at the sky and calculate the ROI. He planted the seed because that was the right action in that moment regardless of what was coming. And the Prophet ﷺ held him up as the model. Not the man who waited for better conditions. Not the man who needed the outcome guaranteed before he committed. The man who planted when the world was ending.

Be that man.

I’m working on becoming him every single day. And for the first time in my life I feel like I actually know what that means.

Plant the seed. Open your hand. Let Allah handle the tree.

That’s all we were ever supposed to do.