“I am guilty of a crime.
“I have no excuse but to say that I am guilty of it. This I cannot deny. What ever it is, even though to others I may lie, but to myself… I cannot deny.
“Yet… I feel so ashamed of myself that I am afraid to meet Him. To ask forgiveness from Him. Too ashamed to utter the words for begging forgiveness.
“Why? Because I have begged forgiveness before… Yet I trangressed yet again.
“I begged again. But again I fell victim to my desires and flaws.
“And again, and again, and again I begged. In all… I broke my promises. In all I broke and disregarded my repentance.
“So now… I am ashamed. So thoroughly ashamed of myself, that I cannot face Him any longer.
“I begin to turn my face away.
“To distract myself of ever facing Him. Although deep, deep, down in my heart, I know… That He is ever-knowing of the state of my soul.
“I cry in this mind of mine, seeing no hope… But to seek forgiveness that is so often and so quickly forgotten…
“What hope is there in offering what one cannot give truly?
“What hope is there for one such as me?
“And thus I fall further into the abyss of sin…
“Without any foreseeable way out. The cycle of sin.”
—
What similarities can you see the above monologue to your own life?
Do you often feel that in your life, you often go back upon your repentance to God?
You repent. Yet not long after, you repeat the same mistake…
You repent again. Yet in not-so-far a future, you find yourself unable to resist the same mistake. Again…
You repent yet again. You start to fear that your repentance may not last long. You begin to become paranoid of yourself. Then you do it again.
Then you give up. You say to yourself, “In myself, I see no hope of ever becoming good. How can I? Even promises to myself and God, I am not able to keep. No human would accept a promise from a person who breaks his a hundred times. So surely God would be angry with me.”
Then you fall into despair and you begin a chain of destructive behaviour.
You know what you do benefits you not. You know this very well. You need not anyone else telling you this. For you are the one who did this to yourself. But what else can you do?? For you have tried and tried to change and be better, but all your attempts have failed and failed! What else can you do?!
—
You see… I know this train of thought. It has happened to me quite often. Yet, alhamdu LILLAH, by His grace, I have not been flung into an irreversible chain of behaviour.
Always remembering that ALLAH is The Most Forgiving (al-’Afuw) helps me. It breaks thr thought when it comes to:
No human would accept a promise from a person who breaks his a hundred times. So surely God would be angry with me.
It helps even more to know the ayaats of the Qur’an that gives ALLAH’s assurance that he accepts the repentance of his servants.
“O our Sustainer! Make us surrender ourselves unto Thee, and make out of our offspring a community that shall surrender itself unto Thee, and show us our ways of worship, and accept our repentance: for, verily, Thou alone art the Acceptor of Repentance, the Dispenser of Grace!
(translation of al-Qur’an by Asad, Surah al-Baqarah:128)
So… Never give up hope that ALLAH would forgive you. If you make a mistake, repent. You do it again; then repent again. Never submit to the cycle. Repent, repent, and repent until you finally leave the sin behind.
I know… It’s hard. But then that is what this life is isn’t it? A test. A test that isn’t hard is not worth taking.
