I want the gold medal! | Ali Reza Panahian

Why do we like to follow celebrities?
What a great plan God has for us to become good!
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We read in Chapter Waqi’ah that people are three groups, “You will be three groups. The People of the Right Hand - and what are the People of the Right Hand?! And the People of the Left Hand - and what are the People of the Left Hand?! And the Foremost are the foremost. They will be the nearest ones to God.” [Qur’an 56:8-11]
But those who win the contest and those who speed up, they are the ones who are close to God. The People of the Right Hand are different from the Foremost. The Almighty God explicitly differentiates between the group of the Foremost and the group of Good People. What a great plan God has for us to become good! How does one feel about winning a contest? “I have to win the gold medal.” Religion means winning the contest.
This should be the basis for the religious education of teenagers. You should tell them, “Do you want to be one of the Good People or among the Foremost?” If you don't give these two options to a teenager, you have destroyed him/her, because a teenager has a tendency toward wanting to win the contest. Don’t you see that he is constantly playing? Don’t you see that he is constantly following celebrities that have won contests? He spends his time to win a contest. But we have asked a group of elderly people who are not in the mood to win a contest anymore to write the texts for Guidance School. They don’t understand teenagers. God has created this age group to win in contests.
May this outdated method of propagating religion be eliminated! Some consider religion to be like the rules for driving that are only for preventing accidents and traffic jams. But this is not religion at all. Religion is a rule book for a competition. If a person doesn’t want to participate in a contest, why does he need religion?! Religion wants all of us to enter into a contest.
Once I travelled abroad. I went to participate in a group prayer downtown in a Mosque there. There were three or four people there who had come to pray. I joined the prayer. I stood in the second row. There were a few [in the first row], and there were a few of us standing in the second row. I prayed and afterwards I was smiling and feeling I had done a good job for praying with my brothers in faith. But the prayer leader kept frowning at me.
Then he talked to me in his own language, which was a little hard to understand. He asked, “Why did you stand in the second row?” I said, “No special reason. So where should I have stood?” He asked, “Don’t you know that standing in the first row brings more reward?” What a mistake! He was right. I should have stood in the first row. You’re arrogant if you say that you don’t need the reward of standing in the first row. You ruin everything like that.
From that day on, wherever I join a group prayer, I stand in the first row. And the first row is always empty! “Agha, you go ahead [stand in the first row]!” “You go ahead!” “No, we are full of spirituality [and don’t need to]!” Is this the way to participate in a contest?!
According to the traditions, if two people arrive at the group prayer at the same time and there is only one empty space in the first row, they must draw lots. We shouldn’t say, “You go ahead.” Rather, we should say, “I’m more in need. We got here at the same time, so we must draw lots. I can’t let go of this reward.” If you are willing to let go of this reward, this means you haven’t understood that religion is a competition!
The Almighty God explicitly differentiates between the group of the Foremost and the group of Good People. “And the Foremost are the foremost.” What a great plan God has for us to become good! Religion means winning the contest. How does one feel about winning a contest? “I have to win the gold medal.”