Couplet Night 3 - Arbaeen 1448

The Wide Gate

We have long mistaken The Witness only for the wound.
We searched among bloodstained fields, counted swords, measured sacrifice by the noise history made when someone fell.
But Heaven was never keeping the same record.

For one stood before a tyrant and his witness was courage.
One never opened her eyes long enough to choose, yet paradise clothed her in a station no earthly pen could bestow.
Another rose before dawn for forty ordinary years, earned his bread honestly, lowered his gaze, kept his promises, and died with no army at his side.
Three roads. Three endings. One Lord.

It was never death that made them witnesses.
It was the life already speaking long before death interrupted the sentence.
The Chronicle loves spectacle. God Loves sincerity.
History asks, "How did they die?"
The heavens ask, "How did they live?"

To become a witness my battlefield may be a contract unsigned, A forbidden coin left untouched when no eye but His could ever know.
It may be the truth I refuse to sell, the silence I refuse to purchase, the prayer no applause accompanies.
Perhaps the greatest battlefield is the one no one else can see,
For willingness is where witness begins.

Not every soul is asked for blood,
But every soul is asked its heart.
Are you willing?
To lose, rather than lie?
To stand, rather than bend?
To walk away, rather than betray?
That question awaits for me every morning.
And should God, in His mercy, never require the final price,
Still may He write among His witnesses the one who had already paid within.

For intention leaves footprints that angels recognise, Even when history does not.

And then there is a child small enough for historians to misplace her name.
Small enough for chroniclers to disagree about the years she lived.
But never small enough to be forgotten By God.
History dropped her from its careful pages.
Heaven never did.
She carried no sword.
Spoke no sermon.
Led no army.
She only loved her father with the whole of a child's heart.
The world could scarcely remember her name.
Yet thirteen centuries later millions still whisper it through tears.
So perhaps The Witness was never measured by how loudly the world recorded your ending.
Perhaps The Witness is measured by what your life kept saying to your Lord.

Wronged, yet never overcome.
Broken, yet never defeated.
Silenced, yet forever speaking.
And when the books are closed, The chronicles fade, and every earthly monument returns to dust,
Only one record will remain.
Not the one written by historians.
The one written by God.
And there, at the wide gate, Many whose names the world never learned will be recognised before those the world could never forget.

Lord, make my life a testimony before my death.
Grant me the courage to be willing, The sincerity to remain faithful, And the grace to walk quietly through the wide gate, known if by no one else, by You.