The Account of the Unopened Envelope

There is the account of a man who was, at one stage, running his own business — by his own admission a business run altogether badly, though there are many people who run a business well; his own way of managing it was simply not sound. His wife rang him one day to ask him to bring home some milk and bread, nothing more, just the basic groceries, and on checking his wallet he found perhaps fifteen or twenty cents in it, no more, with his children at home asking for the most basic food — providing for them being his own responsibility, and he felt the weight of it terribly. He said nothing to her of the truth of it, only that it was coming, inshāʾAllāh; no work had come his way for the past fortnight, and even the jobs he had already done had not yet been paid.

Sitting alone in the office, asking no one and unwilling to beg from anyone or resort to anything unlawful, this verse came to his mind: there is not a single creature that moves on the earth whose rizq Allah (swt) has not guaranteed. In his heart he called on his Lord, saying that he was doing his best, yet struggling even so to feed his children, and asking what he should do. Going through an old book where telephone numbers had once been written down, before the days of the mobile phone, he came across an envelope he had noticed and left unopened, every single day, for years: it was from the Institute of Engineers, Australia, dated five years earlier. Opening it at last, in the name of Allah (swt), he found a cheque for eight thousand dollars, payment for work completed and long since forgotten, that had simply never been claimed.

A cheque's life span is normally six months; after that, a bank will not honour it. He took it down to the bank regardless. The teller checked, told him it would cost something to process so old a cheque, and asked for eight or ten dollars; he told her to take it from the total, and she paid him the rest in full. He had been sitting there worrying that he could not find money for milk, while Allah (swt) had already placed the answer before him. A person's duty is only to work; the duty is never to lose sight of the fact that Allah (swt), and no one else, is the one who provides.