The most important thing you can give your children
Parents bend over backwards to provide the ‘best opportunities’ for their children.
Piano lessons.
Tennis class.
Spanish immersion.
And it is all good.
Yet this is only the icing on the cake.
Without the cake, what’s the value of the icing?
Without the cake, without ongoing/lifelong purposeful iman education, these skills cannot heal the soul, give meaning to our existence, heal our inner qualms… they cannot make us happy.
Yet a dry cake without icing is dry.
Arts, sports, and other hobbies/skills is putting our iman into practice.
Living our iman through different venues in life… We witness God’s Divine Attributes and get to know our Creator through these experiences. We enjoy soulful music and we contemplate how the Artist (Sani) creates everything including us with art and gives us the ability to enjoy arts… or else how can this blood and flesh enjoy music?
We interact with and put all these activities into an imanic paradigm. This way they give us true joy and happiness. Eternal happiness… not momentary pleasures…
Imagine a child, burning with inner existential questions of why he is created… what is the meaning of death and birth he witnesses each day… his soul is tormented unless he finds satisfying answers to these questions.
No piano class, no French lessons, no trips to Europe is ever going to make a child, whose soul is lost, happy…
The best, the most compassionate and wise things parents can do for their children is help their souls to find the meaning of life… nurture their soulful journey… and place all other ‘opportunities’ within this paradigm…
Everything in our life is there so that we get to know our Creator…
Dr. Eren Tatari
