🙂 I remember when Allah taught me this. Never mind how. It irked me at the time, before I understood. Because I was asking Him from His Name, and then it felt at once that something happens to require me to do myself that very thing I just asked for. It irked me because ‘obviously’ I don’t ‘have it’ to give and hence that’s why I asked for it in the first place for myself! But fortunately I obeyed anyway, in whatever capacity I could think of, and then… after some time, I got it. 🙂

It just occurred to me that the Prophet s.a.w. began that way too. After all, the first revelation story famously relates how he was commanded to ‘Read!’ and he kept replying, but I can’t! I think maybe it’s when he eventually simply repeated “Iqra’ “, which really was the best he could do to comply, that’s when/how the rest of it flowed through. It’s quite elegant how, in order to elevate a human being to recite the revelation, the first command was to have him begin to ‘before’ receiving it. After all, if you want to have water flow through a dam, you must open the channel and let some existing water out first. It’s so obvious but somehow so hard to understand until afterwards. Weird, huh?

As far as how you relate birr and the relationship with our parents – that’s one aspect of life that I sorely need to improve by many degrees. I only have my mother left and we still live together though I’m far into my adulthood 🙂 – so will surely take this point into deeper consideration and insha’allah, practice.