There are moments when you search for the words al wadud meaning Allah loves me — not as a theological exercise, but because something in you needs to know if it is still true. When you have fallen short again. When the same sin keeps returning. When your prayers feel hollow and your heart feels far. In those moments, the question underneath every other question is this: does He still love me?
Most of the love we have known in this life has had conditions attached, even when those conditions were never spoken aloud. Love that grew colder when we disappointed. Warmth that had to be re-earned after failure. Over time, we absorbed a quiet belief — that love is a reward for being enough.
And then we bring that same assumption to Allah.
We think: I will come back to Him when I am better. When I have cleaned myself up. When I have something worth offering. We put distance between ourselves and the One who is already near, because we assume that nearness has to be deserved.
But that assumption comes from human love, not from His.
In the Quran, in the chapter of Al-Buruj, there is a verse that carries something quietly devastating in the best way. After speaking of those who were persecuted for their faith, after describing trials that would break most of us, the verse turns — not to wrath, not to judgment — but to this:
"And He is the Forgiving, the Affectionate," [Quran 85:14]
The Forgiving. The Affectionate. Together, in that order, in that moment.
Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say He is affectionate after you have been forgiven. It does not say His love arrives once your account is settled. The two are held side by side — the forgiving and the loving, inseparable. His love is not waiting on the other side of your repentance. It is present in the turning itself.
This ayah has brought comfort to many people who felt they were too broken to be loved by anyone, least of all by God. Not because it erases the weight of what they carried, but because it places something alongside the weight — a love that does not flinch at what it sees.
The love described in this verse is not distant approval. It is not the kind of love that watches from afar and keeps score. It is described as affectionate — warm, close, particular.
This is a love that knows you. Not the version of you that you present to others, or the version you wish you were. The actual you — the one who struggles in private, who makes the same mistakes, who feels the gap between who you are and who you want to be. That person is known. And that person is loved.
There is something almost too large to hold in that truth. Allah does not love a curated version of you. He loves the real one. The one who is reading this right now, in whatever state you are in.
It would be dishonest to say that knowing this always makes it feel real. There are seasons when Allah's love can seem like something you believe in abstractly but cannot feel at all. The prayer doesn't land. The Quran feels distant. The silence feels like absence.
If you are in one of those seasons — that is a real experience, and it deserves to be named as one. Feeling far from Allah is not the same as being far from Allah. The feeling can be real and still not be the whole truth.
The verse does not say He is affectionate when you feel it. It says He is affectionate. Present tense. Not contingent on your awareness of it.
Sometimes the most honest prayer is simply: I cannot feel You right now. But I am here. That too is a form of reaching. And reaching matters — not because it changes His love, but because it keeps the door open in you.
There is a particular kind of trap that people who care deeply about their faith can fall into. They feel unworthy of Allah's love, and so they try harder — pray more, give more, push themselves — hoping to earn their way back to feeling deserving. And when they still feel unworthy, they try harder still.
But worthiness was never the doorway. His love is not the prize at the end of your effort. It is the ground you are already standing on while you try.
This is where something shifts: you do not have to resolve the feeling of unworthiness before you return to Him. You return as you are, carrying the unworthiness with you, and you let Him hold what you cannot fix. You keep showing up — in prayer, in trying, in not giving up on yourself — and you release the outcome of whether you will ever feel worthy enough. That release is not passivity. It is one of the hardest and most faithful things a person can do. Trusting that His love for you is not waiting on your self-improvement is an act of profound tawakkul — surrender not as collapse, but as a decision to stop arguing with what Allah has already said about you.
If you find yourself caught in that cycle of anxiety and trying to earn your way back, you might find something useful in this piece on trusting Allah when you cannot stop worrying — it holds a similar tension.
Not when you are better. Not after you have figured it out. Not once you have finally earned the right to believe it.
Already. Now. In this moment, in whatever state you arrived in.
The verse says it plainly: He is the Forgiving, the Affectionate [Quran 85:14]. Both of those are true about Him right now. Both of them include you.
You do not have to perform certainty about this. You do not have to feel it fully for it to be real. You only have to stay close enough to keep hearing it — in the Quran, in prayer, in the quiet moments when something softens inside you and you remember that you are not just tolerated. You are loved.
When the words feel heavy, My Tawakkul holds them with you — mytawakkul.app
وَهُوَ ٱلْغَفُورُ ٱلْوَدُودُ
"And He is the Forgiving, the Affectionate,"
Quran 85:14
When the words feel heavy,
My Tawakkul holds them with you →