My curiosity was aroused by a heading of an article “I was careless, they were not,” which appeared in the Opinion Column of the Times of India (November 30, 1989). These words, it seemed were the summing up of an experience which an inhabitant of Delhi’s Friends Colony East and while travelling in a train. He described his experience as follows:
I was careless enough to drop my wallet in the rail coach I took from Kalka to Delhi. I took it my pocket had been picked and had to hope of getting it back. The next morning came a telephone call from the office of Northern Railway’s divisional manager to say it had been found. They located me by an identity slip in it. All the contents were intact and I was treated with utmost courtesy by the officer and his staff. (Krishna Khanna)
The unexpectedly happy ending to his tale reminded me of a Persian verse, which very neatly expresses the relationship between God and man: “Our Lord is looking to our needs caring better than we can.”
This is very true of God’s relationship to man, and on a scale so vast as to be beyond human imaginings. But there is a condition to it. Man must have come to trust God to such an extent that he spontaneously exclaims:
“O Lord, I am certain that you will take Care of me; that you will remember me when I have forgotten myself; that you will sustain me when I go astray; that you will be careful when I am careless: that you will forgive me when I have erred.”
When a man calls upon God in this way to be his Sustainer – in a sense making Him his Sustainer – God meets his expectations by “providing him with all the sustenance he requires.
Source: Al-Risala, March 1990
