 Bismillah. A.nh. A.nh. Burmese, Mal권ayi isu A'u ala horsa. Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, Burmese. Alhamdulillah. Sorry, I was adjusting the camera a little bit. I think it was not straight, apologies if it's still not straight. May Allah straighten us, straighten our paths, and rectify us, Alhamdulillah. So today we just wanted to talk briefly about, we're continuing this series and this discussion on the traits of the righteous. And to date we have spoken about a variety of different traits that are very, very important. One of the traits of the righteous that is often overlooked, but that is very, very important. It's a trait of people of Allah. It's a trait of people who have success in this world and inshaAllah people have success in the next world is the trait of focusing. A trait of focusing and prioritization. And this is important because in any moment in life there are millions of things that you and I can do. So many things we could do, you know, we could be hanging out, we could be working, we could be praying, we could be watching something, we could be listening to something, we could be with our families, we could be reading something, there's so many things we could be doing with our life. When it comes to religious acts there's so many things that we could be doing, right? We might have prayers to make up, we could be making up our prayers, we might have prayers, it might be the time to pray, we could be praying, maybe we could read Quran, maybe it's, fasking is incumbent upon us, maybe one is doing all of those. There are many, many, many acts you could be learning knowledge, you could be spreading good, you could be feeding people, you could be helping people, you could be clothing people. There are so many acts that one could be doing and so it's important, sometimes you wonder there are so many things to do, how do I prioritize, how do I focus? And this is really, really, really critical, especially in the time that we live in. Because we can be doing a million things and because there's, it's very, very easy actually to get lost and to not know how to order what we should be doing throughout our day and then throughout our life. So the person who, folk who prioritizes and who says, you know what, this is what I'm going to do. They set out and they make a goal and they make an intention. And this is, this can happen at the level of the intention, inshallah, and then let Allah, right, inshallah, will do the rest. Because we make an intention and it doesn't come to fruition, inshallah, will eventually come to fruition. But what we mean here is you and I make an intention to say, these are the five or ten things I'm really going to prioritize and I'm really going to focus on. Everything else, not really going to make the list right now. It's actually shows when you speak to very, very successful people in this life, right, the CEOs and whatnot, saying no is more important than saying yes. Knowing what to not do is sometimes more important than knowing what to do. And in order to do that, you have to have either knowledge or experience or some mix of both. For our deen, Alhamdulillah, even if one does not have a lot of experience, if one is fairly new to the religion, knowledge is sufficient, right? One can go out and seek the knowledge of what to focus on. And inshallah, there is going to give us that route. But when we go about our life, when we go about our spiritual life, when we go about our routine, when we go about the extra service work we do, when we go about our jobs, there's so many things that we are going to go be going about and doing. Sometimes we might think, oh, I should be doing this thing instead of that thing. And actually what it is, it's a lack of understanding of our enoughs from our enoughs or lack of understanding that we just have deep down inside that we don't know. You know what? Actually, no, today my family has a right upon me. So rather than me going to this extra thing, this voluntary act of worship, it's actually obligatory for me to take care of my family or to spend time with my family if they ask me, right? So I shouldn't go off and do this one extra thing. But that might take some time, it might take a little bit of maturity, it might take a bit of understanding to realize, or let's say that one is responsible for trying to make money. Of course, a risk is from Allah, but for men, for example, it's the job of the man in the sharia, especially if you have a family, to have a job to make money or have a business or something, some way, right? Again, ultimately recognizing that the priority is Allah. One might say, oh, you know what? I'm going to go off and do this project. Meanwhile, the family is struggling. The family is not being able to make ends meet. And somebody is off focusing on some extracurricular project. It could even be related to Islam. But again, the prioritization is incorrect because one thing is super arbitrary, right? Generally speaking, and another thing is obligatory. But that understanding sometimes is not always there, and that can create problems. And so that's what we're talking about today. The more and more one develops a spiritual, they round out their spiritual life, the more they develop their intellect, the more they develop themselves spiritually, the more they do dhikr, the more clarity comes. And when you meet the people of Allah, one of the most amazing things about them, they're extremely clear. They know what they have to do. They know what they have to do. They know at what time, what is demanded of them. You won't see the person of Allah at the time of Fajr, for example, doing anything except praying Fajr in Jamaat, sitting there, doing dhikr after Fajr, doing the sunnah adhkar of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, or reading Quran, or sometimes teaching, let's say, depending on the situation. And you won't see them doing something that is not from the obligatory or the sunnah actions of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in very, very special times because it's so important for them, right? They know what their order and their prioritization is. But we sometimes, we kind of lose sight of that and we'll focus on something else and we'll do something else and we won't know, hey, you know what? This deed is actually more important. How do you know what deed is more important? There's sunnah acts of the year, there's sunnah acts of the month, there's sunnah acts of the week, and there's sunnah acts of the day. There's no act that's better than the sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in a certain time if he actually did it in a certain time. So for an example, and again, we're talking about like religious acts here, but the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam read Surah Kaaf on Fridays. Let's say one wants to read the Qur'an on a Friday. The focus and the prioritization should be what the sunnah is. So it's reading Surah Kaaf, not reading Surah Zuhru for something, right? Like let's say they're both maybe similar lengths, right? Not reading that, no, you focus on Surah Kaaf first and then you go to the next one. That's a, it might seem like a minor thing and it is minor in one sense, but it's important and major in other senses because the barakah, it comes, well, it'll come either way, you're getting a reward for reading Qur'an. But following the sunnah and making intention to do the sunnah is more important, right? So we don't go to like a gathering, let's say, if we haven't even done the sunnah of that day yet, because the gathering is super-ogatory, it's an extra gathering unless it's a gathering of farth knowledge. If we haven't done the sunnah dhikr for that specific day or for that specific time that we're in. That's just an example, right? So these are things that we have to remember and we have to keep in mind as we go about our time, right? So another example, a small example here, but let's say somebody has money, they said they have money saved up and they could invest that money, right? And maybe they say, oh, I'll invest this money and then I'll make money and then I'll donate some of it and I'll start projects and this and that, but they haven't gone at Hajj yet. Hajj is an obligation. If one has the money, Hajj is an obligation. As soon as that money is there, it's the obligation, right? So the focus isn't there. They say, no, I'm going to do this. I'm going to save up for a house. I'm going to do this and I'm not going to go on Hajj. No, no, no, the first focus has to be Hajj and then the rest of it comes, right? It's not like I save up hundreds of thousands of dollars and way later in my life I go on Hajj. No, no, no, no, no, that when that money comes, the main focus has to be let us do the obligation because Hajj is a pillar, right? Anything else saving up for a car, one could lease a car. One doesn't have to own it, right? But knowing these priorities and knowing the order becomes very, very important. So if we don't have this sense, we end up getting confused. And this happens a lot in the Muslim community. You'll have somebody who doesn't, we don't have our basics down. I struggle with this a lot, right? If I don't know my basics of my Deen, but I'm going off and trying to do something else with my time, that's an issue. There's one thing if somebody is not doing religious acts, right? Like, let's say that, you know, we're just whatever we have, we were kicking it. We're hanging out or playing video games or watching TV or whatnot. That's its own separate thing. That's a separate kind of category of actions that has its own issues we're going to have to talk about and deal with. But let's say one is spending time doing religious actions. Let's say one is spending time reading something or, yeah, say one is spending time reading something. Now, there's a lot of really interesting things to read. You could read history of our religion. You could read the Seerah of the Prophet ﷺ. You could read Super Esoteric, the ideas about the soul. If you could read more practical, the soul. If you could read Fiqh, I mean, you could read Akhida, you could read Advanced Theology. There's a lot to read. There's a lot to learn. But let's say that one doesn't have their basics down. We don't know the basics of prayer. That we don't know which, if depending on the mudhub that we might follow, we don't know if we miss a specific act of prayer. At what point do we owe a sajda sahu versus at what point is the prayer completely invalidated versus at what point is it just a mistake that we don't owe anything for? If we don't have that down, and it's okay if we don't, but that's something we have to learn. And then we're spending 20 minutes a day doing something extra religious-oriented. But we don't have that down. It's a focus isn't there. They're talking about an extra act now. One is learning extra knowledge. One is spending. I remember I used to get really interested in reading super esoteric ideas and what not. But again, I didn't have these basics down. And it was a complete trick that was being played on me. Because if I don't have the basics down, what am I spending my time doing? I couldn't tell you, even though I was doing what's a wudu hopefully properly, I couldn't tell you off of the top of my head what the fara'id of the wudu were. So there are fara'id of the wudu and then there are parts of the wudu that if you do them, you'll get rewarded because it's a sunnah. But if you don't have enough water or enough time or if you just don't want to, you don't do them and you still have the basics of wudu down. So what was somebody like me going and reading all these super esoteric concepts if I didn't have that down? It was a lack of focus. Another example. So that's an example of something, right? That if you're trying to do a super augeratory good deed, what's called a naffil deed, when you don't have the basic knowledge down, and I mean like fairly down, it doesn't have to be super, super memorized, but down enough to where when the mistake happens during any normal act of worship, and this is, it takes a couple hours to learn, we were able to figure out what we're supposed to be doing, right? Another example, let's say, you know, maybe not in these days because of COVID, but let's say somebody is going and spending a lot of time at the masjid. Very good. Mashallah. Excellent thing to do. But let's say someone is volunteering at the masjid. Also amazing thing to do. But the home, let's say the home is in chaos. Kids are not getting enough attention. Kids are not getting time. Let's say that their family needs them at home, that the wife needs them at home, or husband needs them at home, they need help, right? And they're going off and doing extra voluntary work, right? That is not absolutely essential to the functioning of the community. If they're the one person who can only do the work, okay, it's a separate conversation. But let's say that they are not that one person. Prioritization issue. Prioritization issue right there, right? Because kids and family, if they need you, they take prioritization over some of the extra work that it is that it might be able to do. Now one might say, how about, how are we supposed to ever do volunteering and service and this and that if we only focus on ourselves? That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that the, the, if let's say kids don't have basic fundamentals of being down, if kids don't have basic knowledge down, if kids are just needing general attention and general help and one is going out and without the kids being okay with it, one is going out and doing extra things, right? Or the house just needs a lot of work internally, spiritually. And the family needs, needs help or someone's spouse needs help. And one is going out and doing something extra. The focus isn't there. First, we focus on getting ourselves. Allah says in the Quran, I believe the ayah says, He gives us the order. It's you, your family, you know that thing on the, on the plane, they say put your, your mask on, right? I think the, if God forbid the oxygen levels get low and then help the person sitting next to you, save yourselves, then your family, right? Then you're an extended family and then your community and so on and so forth. It doesn't say go and save, like try to help all these other people. Meanwhile the family is not getting helped, right? This does happen. You have heard, I have definitely heard stories of people going off on like, you know, really, really long, let's say, Khuruj or Jama'at for 40 days and whatnot, without their family being okay with it and family needing help, the family not having the, the, the support that they need or the money that they need, it's, and someone thinks they're going off on the path of Allah. The path of Allah is described as following the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ and nothing else. It doesn't come and say that the, that the path of Allah is sacrificing the family from a perspective of you, sacrificing the basics. You can't sacrifice the basics unless the family says, you know what, I'm going to give up my rights. Now you go off and go do other work. That's different, but most, most, many families will not be doing this. Let's just another example. Another example, this, this happens, let's say somebody doesn't have a job, right? And it's their, their, it's their responsibility to have a job and they're involved in like a bunch of extracurricular projects, maybe in the community or maybe in something else. And they're spending all their time doing that, but there's no income coming in. Once somebody takes on the responsibility to start a family and to be speaking for men here specifically, because it is a father for men to do this. They now have taken on the responsibility of, of, it is a father, it is a obligatory duty to go out and find a way to earn halal income. And of course Allah is the one who provides. But one person who doesn't have focus might think, you know what, I'm spending my time, I have so I have extra time now, I'm going to spend all of it doing these other things and these other projects and whatnot. And I'm not going to focus on something like this. And you know, this will work itself out. That's not, that's not how it works, right? One has to put time in to getting the obligatory actions down, just like it's an obligation to pray salah. One doesn't say, you know what, I'm just going to wait and salah will be prayed for me. No, one goes out and makes Wudu finds a clean place to pray or goes to the masjid or whatever it is and then prays. Similarly with like a job or something like that, one goes out, they figure out some work that they could do to earn money or they find some business idea to start or they prepare their resume and they prepare for their interviews and whatnot to go out and to do the work. So that's another example of the focus, right? Knowing what to focus and what to prioritize becomes very, very, very important. How we spend our money, also important. And we mentioned this with their example of Hajj, right? There are many, many, many Muslims right now, right? And all of us have proportion in this because we live in the system and the Prophet Salaam told us that this would happen at the end of time. That everything would be, you know, the dust of interest would touch everything. But we might have car loans or we might have mortgages and whatnot. The prioritization, look, taking out interest is considered a major sin in our religion. It's a major sin. It's not a joke. It's just because we think it's a joke or we live in a society where it's become so commonplace doesn't mean it's commonplace. So let's say we have credit card interest, God forbid, or we have a car loan or we have a mortgage. The focus for that person should be the money that they're getting. They got to first put out the fire of Haram, then they focus on doing other things with that money. Hopefully that makes sense, right? So in this case, let's say that somebody has the car loan example, right? One could have leased the car, but instead they bought a car and they took out a loan of 3% APR. Okay. Immediately that person needs to say, okay, I need to figure out how to pay off this interest ASAP because I didn't need to take it. There was absolutely zero reason. I could have leased the car. I could have bought a used car, but I bought a less fancy car, whatever. But I decided to take out and then they need to figure out how to pay off the loan before they go off and spend that money in other places. Why? Because that's the Haram that they're doing, right? That's one of the major harm. Just like if somebody's drinking and smoking before they go out and try to, let's say somebody's like has a drinking problem or something or they're just drinking and they want to get married, let's say, and their wife doesn't want them, their spouse, let's say doesn't want somebody who drinks. They're going to figure out a way to quit drinking in order for them to be able to potentially marry somebody. That's like normal. Again, similarly, when you're trying to get married, somebody might say, you know, I need you to have a job before you get married. So they're going to go out and try to find a job. Now, similarly, if one person is doing something wrong, right, you work on the wrong, doesn't mean you'll get rid of it completely, but we're going to try to work on it before we go out and try to do other things that relate to that medium. So the medium of spending money, we got to know the prioritization. We have to know, okay, I got to pay off my debts first, especially interest relating debts. If I have credit card debt, God forbid. I got to spend as much extra time as possible on paying off credit card debt and on doing this thing and that thing. I sometimes see people who like go, go off on others from a religious perspective and they'll like tell other people, they'll talk about this person does this wrong religiously and this person does this wrong. And they're sitting there with their mortgage and with their interest and all these types of things, not realizing that like, hold on, just zip, we can't speak. Don't reprimand other people. Don't talk backbite other people when, when you and I might be doing a might really much more major haram. Somebody might have worn some clothing that was inappropriate. Someone else might have taken out interest. Allah says in the Quran, he, him and the Prophet of Islam wage war on Allah and his messenger wage war on the one who, who, who takes out interest, right, and gives interest. So, and basically these ideas of relating. So this is an example of prioritization. We have to know what to prioritize. Uh, if we have a mortgage, we have to prioritize. Okay, I got to go. There, there are options out there now. Islamic financing. One has to focus right now on, let's get my house refinance. Let me spend my money getting a refinance through the Islamic loan. Right. Because that is at least inshallah, it's, it's generally speaking. Most of the scholars have said it's cool. Uh, that it's going to get us out of that major haram that we're doing, but this is where the focus comes in. So let's talk about the Hadith that relate to this. This is the Hadith Qudsi meaning that it's a Hadith that Allah relates it. Allah the Almighty, he says, he says that nothing, uh, uh, endears my servant to me, meaning that I don't love my servant more, except then when he or she does an act that I've made obligatory upon them, right? To do. And then my servant continues to draw near to me with Nawafil acts with Nawafil with supragratory actions until I love them. And when I love him, I shall be the hearing with which he sees, right? I shall, sorry, the hearing with which he hears the sight by which he or she sees the hands by which they hold the feet by which they walk. And if he or she asks something of me, I shall surely give it to them. And if they seek refuge in me, I shall certainly, certainly grant it to them. Subhanallah. This is known as the Hadith of Wilayah. It's narrated in the collection of Maul Bukhari. Very, very sound hadith. Now let's think about this. Allah describes here the order. Nothing, he doesn't love anything more, except what? The obligatory actions. Obligatory is to staying away from the Haram, that's, that, and, and doing the farahid and the things that are made obligatory on us. And then Allah says, then adding in the Nawafil, the supragratory actions until Allah loves that person. You and I are in a path, inshallah, in this life to try to attain the love of Allah. These traits we've been talking about, they are to help us attain the love of Allah, to help us attain nearness to Allah. So the prioritization here that we're discussing is to help us know what Allah wants from us. You and I don't get to come up with our own terms. Like, you know what? I don't ever want to pray Fajr. So I'm just going to be like a Doher, Maghrib and Isha kind of guy. And I'll miss Fajr and Asr and inshallah it'll be cool. And I love God and God loves me and it's all good. That's not the way we do things. We say Allah loves the people who he says he loves in the order. And we attain that love by doing things in the order by which we tell that he tells us to do them. Right? And inshallah, Allah can forgive all of our actions and what not. We're not talking here about the cases of Allah's vast amounts of mercy that he'll forgive us or hopefully for all of our mistakes, all of the things we do wrong. That's a given. We know that inshallah. Allah inshallah will do that. What we're talking about here is the effort we have to put in. You know, nobody wants to put in a C plus effort. Go to God and be like, you know, God, I tried so hard in my businesses. I tried so hard at my job. I tried so hard at school. I got straight A's. I did everything I needed to do. I, I, uh, did, I tried my best to be a good father and a good husband and, and you know, everything. Right. And when it came to making money and getting promoted, I was there. I was trying to do all of it. Oh, but when it came to the religion, I put in a C plus effort. I didn't really care. I didn't really care to learn and didn't really care to put in work. You know, I spent 15, 20, 30 years getting an education for this world, right? And learning this computer language and learning that and learning this. But I didn't care to learn about your religion. Is that how you and I want to go to God? No, we need to go to God saying, you know what? I gave 150 million percent to everything and even more than that to, to this religion. I did my best to learn this religion and put it into practice. And then everything else is also all good. But the order, it becomes important. And sometimes in this life, literally people will put in, we all, myself at the top of this is we'll put in so much time into our dunya, so much time into our dunya, into our schooling, into our, into our job, every single thing. And yet for religion, we just kind of do it in like a half baked way. It's fine. You do the basics, you know, no big deal. It doesn't really matter. It just kind of get by and cruise that we can't do that anymore. We need to know what the order is. We need to focus. Let's now figure out what, what the order is. So Allah says first and foremost, the obligatory actions, obligatory is in this, in this order. So first we have to leave the haram, then we do what is commanded. Okay. And we do these obviously simultaneously. It's not like one says, oh, I can never do any good deed until I, um, until I, uh, leave all the haram that I'm doing. We all do haram and we're all going to get caught up in it, but we have to also do the good deeds, right? But this is like the order of what we should be focusing on. So like if I'm again, you know, uh, let's say that somebody is struggling with pornography, right? They need to focus their spiritual energy on exiting that and not focus their spiritual energy on, let's say, trying to, um, you know, look at detailed ingredients of, if something has a very, very, very controversial ingredient in it, and, uh, if there's a difference of opinion on, can they have, you know, vanilla extract or something or not, right? Like you got it. We have to know what, what we're full energy when we have a limited amount of spiritual energy we can give 20 minutes a day, an hour a day, focus on what are the different things I can do to lead this addiction that I have, not what are the different things I can do to add in this very, very specific nuance thing that comes later down the spiritual path and one that wants to get more scrupulous, scrupulousness and being careful starts with leaving the haram and then leaving other things, right? So example here, the big harams, we know these, uh, drinking, smoking, adultery, lying, interest, these types of things, right? We have to figure out, okay, I need to spend my energy and time if I'm doing any of this, or if my family members are engaged in this, how can I come up with plans to leave this? Most of us might not be engaged in, in, in, in drinking and smoking and adultery and whatnot, but let's say somebody's caught up in, in an affair, right? I actually know somebody told me once that like, there was a, um, uh, uh, someone's father was literally having an affair with somebody, right? And I think like a father to child with someone while pretending to be this like must shift going upright Muslim guy and like the family had no idea all this was going on. It was like that person's secretary or assistant or something. And you just wonder like what kind of, what kind of tricks are being played and may Allah protect us on people that you think you can hurt people like that and do that type of thing and then pretend to be like religious on the outside. That's called, um, hypocrisy in the Quran, right? That, so this is where focus becomes important in prioritization because otherwise hypocrisy can become veiled or released inside it from inside of us. So we know, okay, interest was only discussed. If we have anything related to interest in our life, we spend our time, let me get out of my interest. I got to get out of it. Money comes in. I got to spend it there. I got a $10,000. I could save on a vacation, but I got major interest. I got to pay off your credit card debt. No, I'm going to pay off the credit card debt. I got to get out of this interest, whatever interest it has. Oh, I, uh, have a, uh, one house. I want to buy another house for investment and requires me to take out another mortgage that's not a permissible one, right? Like an, uh, or a home equity line of credit. That's not necessary. No, I don't do that. Why? Cause there's interest involved. There's interest involved. It's a wrong, right? So you don't get yourself more and more involved in this stuff. What ends up happening is later in life, one starts to notice, uh, the barricade from life is stripped and they wonder what's going on. It manifests maybe with problems in the household, with fighting, with anger, with depression, with anxiety, with a lack of tranquility. These types of things manifest or problems with kids, et cetera. And one wonders what's going on. And it's because the foundational underpinnings of our life are not built upon solid grounds. So we have to know what to do here. Right. Let's say, uh, you know, another example, dressing extremely inappropriately, right? One has to know, okay, you know what, if I'm dressing inappropriately, I got to spend my spiritual energy on trying to figure out how I can dress better, not on something extra that's related because that ablamated obligatory on me, on men and women to be modest, to dress appropriately, to not wear revealing clothing or tight clothing or anything of the sort, right? So they spend their spiritual energy on that. Don't spend your spiritual energy on extra things until that's solved. Right. Or, or do the extra things, but recognize that that's a problem and that needs to be worked on. Right. Um, another example here, so leaving the haram, let's say one is eating meat that's not slaughtered appropriately. First and foremost, we have to recognize that that's wrong. And then we have to work, spend our time and energy thinking, how can I begin to eat properly slaughtered meat that's slaughtered appropriately, that's raised appropriately, right? That how can I begin to eat halal meat and you spend your time? Okay. You know what, I'm going to spend 10, 20 minutes a day while I have this goal to try to figure out a way to, okay, you know, if I'd like to eat out, I'm going to find halal restaurants. Then slowly I'm going to start bringing in only halal meat into my household and then I'm going to stop and then I'm going to try to figure out, Oh, maybe I can't afford certain types of meat. So I'll just eat, you know, fish for a bit of time. Okay. Oh, I really like McDonald's. Okay. I'll cut back and maybe I'll eat a fish filet instead of the McChicken one has to know, but if we're doing all of that, right? And then we have all this like spiritual energy and then we're like, Oh, I'm going to spend all this time again, doing something extra. Like I'm going to donate all my money and I'm going to spend time leading Quran and whatnot, but we don't have the basic down basic thing down of like eating meat properly. Our energy is not being directed in the right way. We have to implement the basics we learn of the Quran before we go off and read and we should always be reading, but will we go off and try to do too much without getting the basics down? Right? So this is an example. How do we learn this? So the Haram is learned by first knowledge and then it's, it's implemented by action. So it's just like everything else. So we learned the knowledge and what's Haram? Then we, what am I doing? That's Haram. How much of my energy and my time am I going to spend towards leaving the Haram? That's the simple prioritization that we should be focusing on. That should happen simultaneously with the rest of our life. I'm not saying we pause, but I am saying that we, that we prioritize that this I have to leave. We should not get comfortable sitting 15, 20, 25 years of our life, just doing things and not prioritizing the Haram that we have to get out of, right? And this starts with ourselves and then with our families. The next thing we add in the obligatory responsibilities related to worship. So here it becomes three things. First is we have to have knowledge of them and then we act on them. And simultaneously we gain both. So we need to know all the basic details relating to prayer and fasting. And then when it comes time on us to O Zakat for Zakat and then Hajj, we got to know those details. And we should know the basics of what we believe about Allah and about the angels, about the messengers, what's called Akhida. Right. No, that's, that's just the prioritization of knowledge. So if we're going to spend time, this is what I mean when we spend time learning, if we're listening to podcasts and this and that, let's spend a little bit of that time listening to something that's going to benefit us with basic, the basic fundamental knowledge is right. That's really, really, really important. There, there are sites like seekers guidance and other sites that have these down. They'll call it like the fundamentals of thick or something like that, you know, they have courses and whatnot that we can watch to learn this, right? Then after we learn the knowledge, it comes down to acting. Then we act on that knowledge, right? And then we figure out what it is that we owe. Let's say we owe a lot of missed prayers. If we owe missed prayers, we need to be spending our time making up those missed prayers. That's what most of the madhhab say, right? Not all the madhhab, some of the madhhahib will say to focus on doing the farad and the sunnah and then doing the missed prayers. Others will say, don't do any extra prayers until the farad, the missed prayers are done. Based on the hadith that we just read, the obligatory, Allah says, do the obligatory, then do the supragatory. So let's say that we want to pray extra salat. We want to pray salat al tahajjud. Let's say we want to pray enough of the tahajjud, but we have like two, three years of prayers to make up. Instead of making the intention for a nafil prayer, you still can get up before Fajr at like 520 or 530 or whatever it is these days, get up 10, 20 minutes before Fajr, pray tahajjud. But instead, right? Make up a missed prayer because that missed Isha or missed Fajr, you are held to account for it. So make up that missed prayer at that time. And inshallah, you'll get a great reward because you're making up a missed prayer and you're doing it in a special time, but the prioritization has to be there. It doesn't mean we literally sit all day and we spend all day making up missed prayers if we have them, but we do need to prioritize them. A hundred percent. We do need to prioritize them and we got to make them a part of our regular life. This is another example of something that can go wrong and that can become, you know, off. Right? So worship becomes really important and knowing the order of worship. If we regularly miss Fajr before we go off and try to like do extra, extra, extra things, we got to get Fajr down. That's it. There is no spiritual thriving in this life without getting Fajr down. We got to figure out what are the ways I can get Fajr down. How can I sleep earlier and set up an alarm and set up 10 alarms and find ways to make this happen and tell a friend to call me and whatnot to wake me up. We got to figure that out because if we focus on all these other extra things without having the basics down where our barakah will not be coming appropriately. Right? If that means we stop drinking tea at late at night or coffee or something like that. If we drink it past certain time, the caffeine remains in the system and it makes it harder to sleep and then harder to wake up. We got to come up with these tactics and any time you spend researching ways to sleep better so you can wake up for Fajr is time inshallah you will be rewarded for and I'll be rewarded for because we are prioritizing and we are trying to do an act of worship. Right? So that's the we leave the haram we add in the obligatory acts and then we have responsibilities. So these are worship, right? Responsibility to worship. We gain the knowledge. We act on them and we refine. We should regularly be revisiting the knowledge of acts of worship and that knowledge comes before all other spiritual knowledge is let's not spend time reading extra things related to religion until we have read the basics and we have the basics down of Akida and a thick and then of purifying the heart. And we've talked about this. I think this was like a class one or two in the series of knowledge and order of knowledge. The next thing is other responsibilities we might have. And so let's say with relation to work with relation to family time with relation to taking care of our parents or our family with relation to monetary decisions and investments, we got to know what is OK. Let's say I'm responsible for earning money. Let's say that the only business I can start is only way I can earn money is to like start a 7-eleven or something right to start a liquor store. I don't know what right now I got to do is if I'm in that I got to find a way to get out of it and find other ways to earn money. I hear regularly people say no how is somebody who's doing that that's their means of income. How are they supposed to get out of that? Allah says in the Quran that whoever has Taqwa of Allah, Allah will give them a way out. So have Taqwa of Allah don't do the haram thing even if it gives you a lot of money because Allah is not going to be pleased with it. And the money is not halal which means the food is not halal and the clothing is not halal and the cells that make up the body are not going to be halal because they are generated based on the energy you and I get from the food and the actions that we do are not going to be pure. So all of that is related. But we got to know so if our income is not halal we got to be scrupulous and think what can I do to make my income halal if our if we are not prioritizing spending time with family or taking care of parents or something of that like that we got to know how do I shift around my schedule in order to make these things a priority. I'm just talking here now in general there's not one list. Everybody has a different list of what that priority is going to be. So I can't we can say that with religious obligate obligations the list is very clear. Salat, Zakat, fasting, etc. with like what worship obligations but that list is not always as clear for our other obligations that we have. Right. We but we have to know what this is and and figure out how to take care of it. So if our you know our wives are and our spouses have rights over us. So if they want something let's say they say I really want you to stay home and we want to go to do something extra outside. It's it's it's it's we should we should try to honor them and try to try to spend time with them if because they're right that we do that we got to know these things if we're constantly making decisions that are creating friction in our house and we think we're doing so in the name of religion or something. There's a problem there. We got to know right what to do and how to prioritize these things even with regards to worship. OK, let's say that one can pray it's it's it's for for men especially it's highly recommended to sunnah mo akkadah to pray emphasize sunnah to pray in the masjid one could pray in the masjid or one could go off and do something else that's religious but that misses that sunnah at that time. The best thing to be doing at the time of fudger or doher or Maghrib or asor or Isha is to be in the Jama'a ideally if possible to be in the in the congregational prayer. So one tries to prioritize that and moves things around in their schedule to accommodate that. Right. Because that's one of the best things that is that we can be doing. So these are some of the the ways we leave the haram. We we do the obligatory actions right. And then we go on and we add in the sub supragratory actions, the na'afil actions. These are actions like reading extra Quran and doing extra na'afil prayers and doing extra dhikr and doing extra projects and being deeply involved in the community. If you and I are not rooted ourselves, we cannot go off and do all this extra stuff and we can do it simultaneously. We just need to know we got to refine. This is not. It's not easy to figure this out. This this requires a lot to give us complete clarity. But it is very, very important. So let's look. Let's let's remember that. Right. If we really like doing something extra, let's think about. Do we have the basics down of our knowledge? Do we have our prayers made up first? And are we taking care of the basic obligations that we have for our household and for our family and whatnot? If all those things are checked, then we go off and do extra things. But if those things are not checked, there's a problem there, right? And then the next category comes down. We have an obligation to raise our, let's say we have kids to raise our kids in the right in a righteous way. If they are spending their time doing wrong things and we are spending our time, let's say, too much on a job and not getting enough time with the kids and that's they get caught up in the Haram. That's actually on us. That means we miss. We took a misstep with our prioritization. We didn't know how do I prioritize? You see this in America a lot now many, many, many kids do not have parents, right? Present parents because there's so much other stuff that might distract us and the parents and everybody sitting, you know, everybody scores doing their best. But these are ways we can refine, right? People are not getting enough time. The kids are not getting enough time with the family and thus negative traits start to come out and they don't come out until much later in life, right? So if we are, if we have become the type of family who sits around the TV all day or all evening and the kids don't get any quality bonding time or any quality religious learning time or any quality time to discuss what's going on in society and ways to improve all these different type of things that we could be discussing. Well, when the kids have started to have issues, God forbid later, we have to think back. What did we focus on and was it incorrect? And should we have done things differently? So these are the orders. These are the types of categories we have to think about. And then we have to examine our own situation. Every situation will be different, right? So here are a couple of examples and then we're going to get into the practical steps and then we'll end inshallah where it's easy to get confused. So one area for one or two areas, I'm going to list five areas that it's easy to get confused and give kind of one or two examples per area. So one is if one doesn't have knowledge, but they really like doing Ibadat worship, that's a good thing, but they have to be fixed. Worship comes after knowledge. So if one likes to do extra worship, like let's say when somebody wants to go on Umrah, but they don't have their farth, basic farth knowledge down. Literally, that's better to spend time at home learning the basic farth knowledge for knowledge than it is to go into an extra major, an extra act of supragatory prayers, right? Or supragatory Umrah or whatever it is. But these things are not easy to understand. They take time for us to understand, right? That that we may act in a very subtle way, very subtle way. Allah says in the Quran, have you seen the one who takes their hawa, their desire as their Lord? There's types of desires. There's the obvious desires, the sexual desires, the food desires, the desires for money and power and fame. Then there's the very subtle desires and the subtle desires are very hard to know. And so you and I have to constantly be examining ourselves and know, am I following a desire or am I following what Allah wants? And usually if you're following what Allah wants, it's hard to do because enough doesn't like doing it. It doesn't like following what Allah wants it to do. It doesn't like being commanded and told what to do, right? Another example, right? We already mentioned this. If if we have debts, we owe or fast, we haven't made up or prayers we haven't made up and we're trying to do extra things. No, we got to go off and do that. We got to make up our stuff first. Then we go off and do anything extra. We miss we mentioned the children issue, but if our children are caught up in Haram, that becomes major priority one. If we know our child is smoking or drinking or partying or or we have suspicions that they're watching pornography or Haram or something, we got to we got to we got to come up with strategies subtle yet relevant and tactful strategies to spend more time with the children and figure out ways to help them out, right? We cannot just kind of expect them to fix themselves. It's a mixture of spending time and then praying and relying on Allah and taking the outward steps, but also relying inwardly on Allah, right? So and then the other example here that we'll mention is let's not get confused. A lot of times this this idea comes up, you know, I'm a good person inside, but I just don't really do the extra stuff outside. That's one of the that's a sign of a major lack of intellectual clarity. Somebody look, our religion is about being good inside for short. All of the acts of worship are supposed to help make you and I a good person inside, but there is no idea in our religion of I'm just a good person, but I'm not going to do the worship. That just doesn't exist. And it and unfortunately I hear that, you know, from time to time. It's not how it works. There is no idea of I'm just a good person, but I don't really pray, you know, or like, oh, I'm never going to pray, but like, I just I'm a good guy. You know, no, the good, the goodness is with both, but there's no excuse for missing the prayer. There's no excuse for it, right? The prioritization has to be clear. Nobody goes and does extra credit if they haven't done the first the basic assignment. That's just not how it works. Nobody tells their boss, you know, their boss says, Hey, please make, you know, a 10 page slide deck to answer these three questions about this company. And you go off and make a 15 page Excel spreadsheet, answering a totally different set of questions for a totally different person and says, Hey, look what I did. And they say, what did you do the the task that asked you to say, no, no, I didn't do that. But look, I did this one. Look, it isn't even nicer. And they say, this is irrelevant until you get the first one done prioritization and focus. This is one of the most important traits in our religion. It's a very important trait in the world that we live in. It's one of the hallmark traits of the righteous and also hallmark trait of people of success in this dunya of CEOs and of executives, you'll see executives, good executive in the corporate world, for example, they know how to focus. They know these are my five strategic priorities for this year. Nothing else gets in the way. Maybe they're shifted, but things don't get in the way. There's always a million things you and I could spend our time doing. But these are the things I got to spend my time on. Let's take that type of rigorous approach when it comes to our priorities for our religion. We've got to know what to spend our time on. Every good deed is important. Everything is good, but the order does matter. So we've got to know if we have a certain amount of energy. This is the concept kind of in a summary. If we have a certain amount of energy that we're going to devote spiritually, we have to know where to channel that energy. And we have to know how to spend that that energy in the best way possible. And it's going to be different depending on who we are, who we live with, where we live, what type of situation we're in, what's happening in that week or in that day or in that month with our life. So this is where knowledge comes in. And most importantly, we're trophic and clarity from Allah comes in. But Allah does say that He says to do the obligations first and then to do the supprogatory and that that now comes in all aspects of life. Do the basics, the foundation and then do the extra. And Allah says that He will love you. He will love us. Right. Another example of this is for Quran. If we if we don't know how to recite Quran properly, Tajweed, but we we spend our time, I was also like this, I was spending my time reading some, you know, super esoteric book. But I didn't have Tajweed down. I had to remember of somebody once told me that, you know what, think this is so important, you have to go and learn how to recite the book of Allah properly. And I thought in my mind, and I don't mean this in any bad way. I was like, why is it so important? I'm doing my best for that's why my intention is right. But this person clarified for me. You know what is the intention is good. But you got to put an effort, dude, you have you easily have one or two hours a week that you could spare to learn how to recite Allah's book properly. So don't say that you don't, right? Like I could go off and go to a Moli their thicker gathering or whatever. But if I don't have the basic thing down that this person was telling me that stuff is actually not nearly as beneficial for me. The order does matter here, right? So this is what this person was teaching me in that situation. And Hamdullah, it was very, very helpful, right? So what did what what this what what these ideas are talking about? What do they not mean? Let's talk a little bit what they don't mean. It doesn't mean we don't do any good until we leave all the Haram. No, it means we just do it simultaneously. We're messing up and we're trying to do good. That's what we got to know. I got to I got to leave certain things first in terms of when I focus my energy on what I got to quit. I quit this, then I quit that, then I quit this, right? Somebody's like smoking a bunch of weed and then they're trying to like quit their video game addiction. No, no, no, quit the weed addiction first and channel it to a video game addiction, then quit the video game addiction, channel that to something else slowly, slowly, slowly into all the addictions are gone. That's an example here, right? And you would you'll see this example in other parts of society as well. But it also doesn't mean that that we don't do any extra thing until we have the basics down. No, we do the extra stuff too, right? So if we don't have our basic knowledge down, it doesn't mean we don't ever give a charity or something. No, we do. But we know that, okay, I'm actually giving this charity knowing that like, I have a lot of Zakat that I owe from the past I got to give to and I got to calculate that and I got to give that. Hopefully that makes sense, right? So the or the ways to get this focus, the first and foremost is to ask Allah for help and ask him for clarity. The second is to spend time learning, learning, learning, learning, knowledge is so powerful. Spend time learning. Okay, I'm going to learn what I need to in order to get my deen down properly. And I'm going to read, I would recommend reading certain books of Imam al-Khazali, reading the books of Imam al-Haddad and other books. And, you know, that type of category where they help us understand the one of the best books we can read just as a practical one, the beginning of guidance by Imam al-Khazali. It's a good summary and it gives us an order of what to focus on from the beginning of the day all the way to the end of the day. Right? And so we know, okay, if I have extra time and I want to do a spiritual activity and I've checked off all the boxes, this is what Imam al-Khazali says, the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ was at a specific time of day. So this is the extra good deed or extra du'a or something it is that I could be doing. Right? Always remember, there's no, for example, there's no dhikr that's better than a sunnah dhikr that the Prophet ﷺ would do at a certain time, at least from my limited understanding, Allah knows best but this is what I've understood. So if the Prophet ﷺ did a certain dhikr at a certain time, it's best for us to do that dhikr at that time. That is from the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ and he is our master and our teacher. So the first is ask Allah for help. The second is spend time learning. The third is to spend time and have moments of spiritual clarity and insight. The best way to do this is to have time before Fajr and have time during Fajr where we just are silent and we just think and reflect and ask Allah for clarity. That's very, very important. It brings a clarity to the mind and to the soul that allows the the prioritization of our life to become very clear, inshallah. The fourth thing that we can do is spend our time learning the sunnah details of the sunnah but the Prophet ﷺ would do in each moment. Okay, so he would do this upon waking up. He would do this dua in the morning. He would do this upon going to the to relieve himself. He would do this when he wore his clothes. He would do this when he would go to to go outside when he left the house. He would do this when he ate a meal. He would do this after he ate a meal. These types of dua is very, very important because they actually bring a type of barakah in the day. And lastly, just studying his life and knowing this is how he would and we take examples from his life. And there's so many examples in his life where even at the time when he did them, for example, many treaties that he made this ahaba were like, wait, wait, wait, why are you doing this? That's what they might have been thinking. Right? Or maybe, I shouldn't say as-tafrullah. Maybe they weren't necessarily thinking that but there was a little bit of confusion on why certain treaties and whatnot were being made because the Prophet ﷺ they thought that it was seen that the Prophet ﷺ was compromising in a certain way. But again, he had his prioritization correcting you exactly what he was doing. That if he makes a certain treaty, it will open up people's minds and eventually it will allow for fatimakah to happen and Allah was arranging things in a very, very beautiful way. Right? But this is where somebody who knows how to prioritize things is going to become very, very important. One can go to remember our religion and we'll end on this is the religion is a middle way. This is a balanced nation. The Prophet ﷺ said that this is a middle ummah. It's a balanced ummah. There are people who can go to extremes with over-practicing with regards to not giving their family rights. So there were people at the time of the Prophet ﷺ who would pray all night fast all day and not give time to their family. And the Prophet ﷺ reprimanded them and told them my sunnah is to fast and to break my fast and to spend the night with my wives. Like that's my sunnah. So don't think that and I sleep and I pray. So don't think that you can be on this religion if you're not following The Prophet ﷺ said that. And then there are people who don't want to do any of the worship and who just want all the good of the religion. The Prophet ﷺ told us that's not how it works. You have to put in the work and then and then do the good deeds. Right? That those people the people who believe and they do good deeds belief and good deeds are linked but it comes in the order of first obligatory. We got to know what's obligatory. We got to know what's haram. We leave the haram. We simultaneously spend time getting the knowledge down of the correct things to do. We do that and then we add in Nawafil prayers Nawafil actions and then we'll start to see a different type of barakah and a different type of tofiq and a different type of khair and hopefully entering our lives. And this is something we've observed from our teachers. I don't make any claims. This is something I'm working on active but hopefully actively I can work on this every day or at least every week or every month. And so we ask Allah make this a time of focus and clarity and prioritization and ease for all of us that He give us the ability to focus on our lives and in our family lives and with any and with our jobs with our organizations anything it is that we're doing that we know what to do at the right time. And Allah inspires us this is what to do in that moment and that He inspires us to do the best thing that is most pleasing to Him in that moment that we don't be people in that we're not people who waste time we ask you ya'at hama raheemin we ask you ya'at Allah Allahumma salli wa sallim Muhammadin wa alaihi sallim that you give us this ability and you give us tofiq and you assist us we're struggling with any diseases and anybody who is struggling with the coronavirus that you cure them that you bring ease and order back to this society Ya'at al-alameen Ya'Allah and back to the world Ya'at al-alameen Ya'Allah and that you and open up the doors of your heavens Ya'at al-alameen and pour down your luth and your khair and your generosity and your gentleness upon us wa sallallahu wa sallim wa barik ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa alaihi wa sallim Alhamdulillah Ya'at al-alameen Al Fatiha Bismillahirahmanirahmanirahmanirahmanirahmanirahim Ya'at al-alameen A'idna sra'at Al-Mustaqeem sra'at al-alameen alam ta'ala maa ila mahdoubi ala'a al-alameen Al- wherein we pray Astaghfirullah Khair As-salamu alaikum wa sallam insya'Allah and next week As-salam alaikum