Recharge Your Spiritual Batteries: Reflections from a Funny Experience

by Usman Majid

Yesterday I had an experience which quite literally brought to life an analogy we hear often – the concept of ‘recharging our spiritual batteries’.

As I sat in a café to work, I noticed my phone battery was dying. I reached into my bag and pulled out my power pack, only to realise its battery was fully dead too.

While on the phone with an accountant I was preparing to type in an important reference number, only for my laptop’s battery to begin dying, causing me to rush to put in the charger.

Later as I wrote in my journal, I put my wireless earphones in to block out the background noise. Yep, you guessed it. A couple of moments into it, they also died!

Later when I got home, as I began grooming my beard, my clipper completely ran out of battery half way through my shape up. (Don’t worry my beard is still alive, Alhamdulillah).

So, where am I going with this?

As each of my device’s batteries died, I was unable to achieve my purpose. It was an inconvenience, added more frustration and cut my work short. I was completely reliant on those batteries being charged so that I could achieve my goal without interruption.

Our spiritual reality is somewhat similar.

Unless our spiritual batteries are “charged”, we will constantly find parts of our lives feeling incomplete and meaningless. We’ll feel unable to reach our goals, we’ll feel dysfunctional and powerless, and the very energy we exert will dip.

Every Salah prayed on time, every repetition of God’s name, every glance at the Quran, every blessing sent upon the Prophet ﷺ, every supplication uttered, every sincere prostration, every splash of water during ablution, every hour spent fasting; all of these actions serve a very specific purpose and affect our physical, spiritual, emotional and mental states in their unique ways.

They serve to keep our “batteries charged” so that we can function properly.

Every late or missed prayer, every day of neglecting God’s Book, every sin acted out of negligence are all means by which our batteries become drained. The physical will directly affect the spiritual, and vice versa.

A simple example is one we find in the hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ describes the state of one who wakes up and prays the Fajr prayer vs the who sleeps and misses it:

“…one gets up energetic with a good heart in the morning; otherwise one gets up lazy and with a mischievous heart.”[Sahih al-Bukhari]

Whatever it takes to “recharge your batteries”, ensure that you’re giving those activities enough importance. If you’re finding it difficult, then “borrow someone else’s charger!” – i.e. surround yourself with those whose energy will charge you too.

So my question for you is, what keeps your “spiritual batteries charged”