KOPITALK JIWA
When the Heart Walks Only by Flashes
A reflection on Surah Al-Baqarah, Ayat 17–22
I was afraid of lightning as a child.
The flash always came first — sudden, sharp, and without asking permission. For one brief second, it showed everything the darkness had been kindly concealing.
The room.
The shapes.
The real scene, whether you were ready or not.
And then came the thunder.
That was the part that frightened me more.
Because thunder meant the truth had not merely flashed. It had arrived. That deep, rolling sound filling the chest felt like a warning — something much larger than you had entered the room and could no longer be ignored.
As a child, I thought I was afraid of lightning.
Perhaps I was really afraid of the truth it brought.
I thought about that childhood fear during a recent taddabur class on Surah Al-Baqarah, ayat 17 to 22. Because both images are in these verses — the light that reveals, and the thunder that announces. And sitting with them, I began to wonder whether the child’s anxiety and the heart’s anxiety are not so different after all.
The flash shows what is there in the darkness.
The thunder tells you that you cannot pretend you did not see.
— — —
Allah gives us two images in these verses.
The first is a fire. Someone lights it, and for a moment, light spreads around him. Everything becomes visible — the path, the people, the comfort of being able to see. Then Allah takes away the light. And the person is left in darkness, unable to move.
It is a frightening image because it tells us something the heart does not always want to hear.
Not all darkness begins with ignorance.
Sometimes darkness comes after we have already seen.
The munafiq was not someone who had never encountered truth. He saw the light. He felt its warmth. He walked among believers and experienced the comfort of belonging, the language of faith, and the outer shape of guidance. But because the heart refused true iman, the light did not settle inside.
It remained outside him.
And here is the part that stays with me. Knowledge received but not lived does not simply disappear. It remains. As evidence. As a quiet argument against the very self that was given it.
That is the more frightening darkness.
Not the darkness of never having seen.
The darkness after knowing.
— — —
Then comes the second image. The one closer to my childhood.
Allah describes a rainstorm — darkness, thunder, lightning. Whenever the lightning gives them light, they walk. When darkness covers them again, they stop.
But notice what they do with the thunder.
They put their fingers in their ears.
Not merely because it frightens them. But because the thunder announces what the lightning has just revealed. The flash shows the truth. The thunder declares that you cannot pretend otherwise — that the weight of knowing has arrived, and with it, the obligations that follow.
The discipline. The ego-lowering. The demand to be consistent, not merely inspired.
The munafiq wanted the warmth of belonging without the surrender of the heart. He wanted the identity of faith without the interior work faith requires.
So he blocked the thunder.
When faith feels easy, he walks.
When it asks for discipline, he stops.
When reminders comfort him, he walks.
When they correct him, he stops.
When religion gives him language, he walks.
When religion asks him to become truthful, he stops.
He was not afraid of the lightning.
He was afraid of the oncoming truth.
— — —
That mirror does not point only outward.
It is easy to read verses about hypocrisy and think of someone else. But the journey of the heart begins by noticing the small contradictions within ourselves.
I think of the good I delay though I am able. The apology I owe but keep postponing. The advice I reject because it stings. The truth I know but do not say because silence protects my comfort.
Small things.
But small things repeated become a direction.
And perhaps that is how the darkness returns — not all at once, but little by little, each time we choose not to walk after the light has shown us the road.
— — —
Then, after all the darkness and the storm, the Qur’an turns and says something very simple.
O mankind, worship your Lord.
This — according to the scholars — is the first direct command to all of humanity in the Qur’an’s arrangement. Not to one tribe or one generation. To all of us. After parables, after warnings, after images of fire and storm, the call is simply: return to foundation.
The purpose of that worship is not ritual without soul. It is taqwa — a living shield between the heart and what destroys it.
The ground beneath our feet — He provided it. Before we learned how to walk, the earth was already beneath us. Before we understood hunger, provision was already written.
Yet the heart still bows before status. Still gives its deepest fear to what cannot create. Still gives its deepest hope to what cannot provide the very ground on which it stands.
That is not only ingratitude.
It is simply illogical.
Tauhid is not a sentence on the tongue. It is the reordering of what the heart obeys.
— — —
The Qur’an chose these images — fire, darkness, lightning, thunder, rain, fruit — not to deliver a cold lecture. But because the body already understands them. Before the mind explains, the heart recognises.
Fire that goes out after you finally found its warmth.
Darkness that comes not at the beginning, but after the light.
Lightning that shows everything, whether you are ready or not.
Thunder that announces you must now live by what you saw.
Rain that softens what has become hard.
Fruit that only grows from ground willing to receive.
Maybe that is the real question.
Not whether we were moved by the flash.
Many of us have been moved before — by a verse, by a loss, by a quiet moment after prayer, by guilt that visited when no one else was watching.
The question is whether we allowed the rain to reach us.
Whether the ground is still soft enough for something to grow.
Because a heart touched by guidance should eventually produce fruit — not spiritual excitement that fades by morning, but something quieter and more lasting. A more honest life. A heart that remembers Allah not only when thunder shakes the sky, but also when the day is calm and ordinary.
— — —
The storm may still frighten me.
But I understand now what the child did not fully understand.
The lightning was never the real thing to fear.
A flash is brief. A flash asks for emotion. It allows us to feel moved without yet being changed.
But thunder is different.
Thunder asks for honesty. It asks: now that you have seen, what will you do?
Perhaps the deeper prayer is this: Ya Allah, when the truth arrives, do not let me cover my ears.
What I fear more now is a heart that has learned to walk in the flash — and cover its ears before the thunder.
— KopiTalk Jiwa
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