This is one of the commandments which man has made a crime, punishable by prison if you break it.  Not only is stealing a sin against God, but man sees it as a sin against your fellow man which should be punished severely.  This commandment is pretty short and there is not a lot up for interpretation.  Either something belongs to you or not, and you have a choice to either leave it where it is or take it for yourself.

 

You look at crime today and it is out of control.  I remember watching the news and seeing all the robberies, car-jacks and break-ins and realized that being a thief is an occupation; this is how some people make a living.  They go out and steal things, sell them and use the money to live on, the same way most of us wake up, go to work and live off the paycheck we get on Friday.

 

Thieves have many justifications why they think it is ok for them to steal from you.  One is the thief decides you don’t really need that anymore, and they have a use for it so they take it.  This goes along with my theory of “entitlement”.  People today think they are entitled to the same things everyone else has.  Part of the capitalist theory is, if you work hard you will earn more money and be able to afford the better things in life.  As a result you will enjoy a better life with more toys.  The flip side of this theory is if you don’t work hard, you will not make as much money and will not have as good of a life.

 

People come along and see what you have and decide they want it.  They do not care how hard you worked to get the things you have, they just see your stuff and want it!  If you have it, they should have it also and they feel entitled to have it.  Since you are not going to just share with them then they need to help you in this department and steal it from you.  To them it doesn’t matter what sacrifices you made to get the things in life you have.  If they want it and can take the easy road to getting it, stealing it, then they will.

 

This next story is one of the most pathetic examples of how people justify stealing.  My sister-in-law came down with cancer.  She took nine months off of work to go through all her chemo and radiation treatments and was sent back to work.  She worked for about six months before she started to feel sick again.  She went back to the doctor and found out her cancer had come back.  With that she had to stop working and start going to chemo treatments again.  And as we all know, when the cancer comes back you are usually on the way out.  So now my wife’s sister is getting chemotherapy every three weeks, paying $2100.00 per treatment (her co-pay), can no longer go to work, because she is sick and spends all her time in bed recovering from the last chemo treatment, in order to rest up for the next one.

 

One day about 4:00pm we went over to see Kathy.  As we pulled up we saw her maid come out the side gate carrying two white trash bags.  We thought that was a bit strange and later realized they were full of clothes.  Not only was the maid being paid to clean the house, but she was also cleaning out her house.

 

My wife told Kathy about this and she looked really sad.  She said, “She probably needs it more than we do,” and let it go.  She went through her two year old son’s things and realized the maid had stolen his clothes.  After further investigation she realized the maid had stolen her fourteen year old son’s Cub Scout pins and other trinkets of his which he was saving.  These things had meaning to him, they were his childhood mementos, and they were stolen from him, as a child.  He will never have them as an adult to look back on the precious moments when both he and his mother held them in their hands together.

 

We all have little mementos we hold on to through life.  Maybe we never use them again, but every now and then we look at them and recall another day, another time in our life and savor that moment.  I have mementos and they have very little dollar value, but they are my treasures.  My V-Cut cigar clipper is one, it costs $26.00, but it is one of the neatest things I have.  It is about the size of your thumb, the frame and cutting mechanism are chrome and it has cherry wood inlaid on either side of the handle.  You push down on one end and it opens up and then you push down on the top and it cuts your cigar (a classic V-cut).

 

It came to me wrapped in love and every time I use it, I think of the woman who gave it to me 28 years ago on Valentine’s Day, handing me this box and saying, “here you go honey happy Valentines Day.”  If someone took that from me, he would steal from me a priceless memory of the woman I love, ultimately married and have spent my life with ever since.  In the case of my nephew, he will never have that pin which by taking it out of a box and holding it in his hand would bring back the memory of his childhood when he stood there with his mother and she told him how proud she was of him and how much she loved him.  The memories of his mother will always be there for him, but if he could just hold that pin in his hand it would bring back that special moment in time over and over again.

 

Kathy checked her little keep-sake bag and realized that it had been plundered also.  You know the keep sakes we all have.  The first pair of earrings your 7 year old gave you.  They only cost $1.99 but your child bought you those for Christmas and though they are so simple they were delivered with more love than you could find to fill up an entire jewelry store.  We all know the Visa commercial that ends with a question followed by the word, “priceless.”  What are priceless are those little things we put away in a safe place and hold on to forever.  The things that have very little intrinsic value, and were given to us out of love.  When we remember the moment we received them, it brings back a flood of memories filled with joy and happiness. 

 

That is what that maid stole from a dying woman who paid her to clean her house, because she was too sick to do it herself.  The maid saw these as nothing more than things she wanted and things the dying woman didn’t need anymore.  She stole from her the only thing she had left on this earth before she died; her priceless treasures and the loving memories that went with them.

 

I imagine the maid saw this as a situation where she was cleaning the house of a woman who owned a house and could afford to have it cleaned and justified it with the thought she did not need these things anymore.  Her youngest son would out grow the clothes, the oldest son was in high school and did not need these scout pins anymore and the woman of the house was going to die anyway so why did she need any jewelry? 

 

On the surface it sounded real good to the maid, it made sense to her since she just looked at the dollar value of the items she took.  If you look a little deeper you will see the maid stole from a defenseless dying woman who gave her a job.  And on top of that, when she was told the maid was stealing from her, she forgave her anyway. 

 

The maid stole from her the only things she had left to hold on to until her last breath.  She stole her most precious memories, the ones that brought joy into her heart; the thing chemo rips out and would continue to do so until her inevitable death.  She stole from her son the keepsakes of his childhood with his mother.  The memories of the scout pins he earned with her help.  A pin he could hold in his hand and look back on happier days and bring back the memories of when his mother was healthy and they were together.  These pins, like my cigar cutter to me, could have brought back memories of a seven year old boy with his mother, a mother now gone forever way before her time.   No big deal right?  They didn’t need these things anyway.  The maid was a maid, living on a maid’s salary and she wanted these things for her kids.

 

Just to finish the story, you are probably wondering what Kathy did about this maid.  She told my wife she did not want to embarrass her, by confronting her about all the stuff she stole, because she was probably poor and needed them.  Instead she told the maid she could no longer afford her and had to let me go.  She humbled herself in front of a thief to spare her the embarrassment of her crime!  I must admit, Kathy was a better person than I.

 

So if you have any moral conscience at all then the next time you are temped to take something you think is neat, ask yourself what it must mean to the person who owns it.  It has meaning to her; that is why she kept it and did not give it away or toss it in the trash, so leave it alone.

 

Another justification why people think it is ok to steal is “they have insurance, the insurance company will pay to replace it,” so they are not really hurt anyway.  Well insurance or not, the victim of theft is out a lot more than you think.  First off, most insurance companies have a deductible so the victim of the crime has to pay something to get back what was taken from him.  Though the insurance company pays up you can never get an exact replacement for what you lost.

 

I own a 1997 Chevy S10 pickup.  The Kelly Blue Book value (the amount it is worth if I sold it) is $4665.00.  If it was stolen that is what insurance would pay me but, I could not get the same truck for $4665.00.  I have taken care of that truck for nine years.  I get the oil changed, keep it tuned and keep the body in good shape.  It has no dents or scrapes on it because I always tell my little league team to leave the equipment at the back of the truck, because they always try to throw it over the side and scratch the paint on the side. 

 

Now, there is no way the money I get from the insurance company will allow me to get a truck like the one I have.  Anyone who has a truck like mine and has it in as good a shape as mine is not about to sell it, but they will hold on to it through the golden years.  Yes I hold on to cars a long time and take care of them.  My dad bought me a VW bug in 1970 and I replaced it with this S10 pick-up in 1997.  So for someone to steal my truck and think that the insurance will cover my loss is wrong, insurance or not, I am a victim of that crime.

 

Think about the emotional hurt the victim of the crime feels.  My wife told me a story about when she was twelve her mother bought her a Schwinn Varsity ten speed bicycle for her birthday (the ultimate bike of the 70s).  Along with the bike, she also got one of those cute $1.98 chains they used to sell you so you could lock up your new bike. 

 

Her mom told her not to take her new bike to the beach, but she did anyway.  It was her birthday so she rode her new bike down to the beach for the day and locked it up with that chain.  After a great day at the beach with her friends she headed up to get on her new bike to ride home to her birthday dinner and cake only to find her cute chain cut in half hanging in the fence. 

 

Now that is a real mood killer; her great day just turned to heart ache.  Talk about riding the pendulum of emotional highs and lows.  How exciting to get a brand new bike, something you have been wanting for months, and then to have it taken from you on the same day.  How sad, how painful, to have something that was special to you to be just taken from you as quickly as it was given to you? 

 

Back then, stealing bikes was big business.  Everyone wanted a 10 speed and thieves would cruse the beach parking lots in vans.  They had a crew, some guys were out with the chain cutters getting the bikes, and other guys were in the van taking off the tires and handlebars, so they could fit more bikes into the van.  When the van was full they would go back to their place, put the bikes back together and sell them in another town.

 

Since we are talking about the Ten Commandments let’s go back to the Fifth Commandment, honor your father and mother.  Well, after my wife’s mom gave her the new bike she told her not to ride it to the pier.  She told her it was too new and someone would steal it.  Well, mom was right.  Had Karen listened to her mother and honored her, she would not have suffered the loss of her bike and could have gone home with a smile on her face instead of tears.

 

Instead of spending the afternoon up at the football stadium watching the CAL Bears pound the UCLA Bruins into submission my son spent the day at the library.  Aaron Rogers was the quarterback at Berkeley that year and they were pounding everyone, except USC.  He had spent half the day with the librarian finding unique books about the report he was writing.  Like most college libraries Berkeley’s is huge and it took half a day with a trained librarian to find about five books on the topic he was writing about.  He then spent the rest of the day and evening reading the books and writing his term paper.

 

About 11:00pm, Brad returned to his room in his frat house, to take a break from all his work.  Since we taught him as a little guy not to use public bathrooms he locked his backpack (with laptop and books) in his room and went to the bathroom.  When he returned he saw someone jumping out the window of his room.  He gave chase, but could not catch him.  I told him he was lucky, because if he had caught up to him, he probably would have been stabbed. 

 

He was really upset.  He had spent all day and night working on that paper and now it was gone.  He had to go to the teacher on Monday and get an extension to turn it in.  All the reference books were gone as well, so now he had to recreate the wheel and find the information he already had.  To my surprise this theft was covered by our homeowner’s insurance policy (less our $500.00 deductible), but what about his loss? 

 

He lost all that time and creativity.  It is hard to recreate something once you have done it the first time.  There is always that feeling that you are not getting ahead, only regaining lost ground so it is harder to be creative.  UC Berkeley lost 5 great books.  Brad would have to replace them, but would they be in as good a shape as the ones stolen.  All that work lost.  A computer was stolen with three years worth of college papers in it.  Five unique books (which only a college library would have), time, effort and the creativity of a young man who was only trying to better himself, lost forever.  They stole more than just physical objects; they stole part of his life.

 

Stealing causes so much pain to the victim who owned the stolen objects.  We put value on all the things we have and no matter how insignificant something might seem to you, the person who owns that thing sees it in a different light.  That is why they have it, they like it, they love it, and someone comes along and takes it.  No matter how insignificant something is to you, if you want it, and it is not yours, you should just leave it alone.  It is not yours, but someone else’s who has already put a much greater value on it than you have, so just leave it with the proper owner.

 

All of us have been a victim of theft and we know that our world would have been a better place at that time, had something not been taken from us.  Well, how do we make our world a better place by not stealing?  First off, if we do not steal from our family and friends we will spare them the pain of losing their treasures.  Of course we don’t steal from them so whoever we do steal from is someone we don’t know and don’t care about.  Well, just because we don’t know someone doesn’t mean it is ok for us to make her suffer.

 

I remember when I was going to therapy (after my father died) the topic came up about how I could get really angry and cut loose on someone.  Not physically but verbally tear into them.  The therapist described it like a missile shot out of a submarine that comes up and torpedoes my life.  I agreed and asked him to explain that.  He told me that when I was little and my dad would yell at me I would take that fear and pain and stuff it away.

 

Our fears, pain, disappointments and sadness in life turn into anger if we do not deal with them.  I could not get rid of these feelings, because to do that would have meant facing my dad and there is no way I was going to do that.  I could not deal with it, because I was a little kid who was clueless and just trying to please daddy.  So it turned into anger and I grew up with all this pent up anger and when the situation called for it, that anger would come out. 

 

If you steal from someone he will become the victim.  At some point he will deal with it, get into the anger phase and get past it or he will stuff it away.  If he holds on to it you will have helped create one more angry person in the world.  This new angry person will in turn make someone else a victim of his anger and now there will be two more angry people out there.

 

Someday an angry person is going to dump on your life.  It may not be the one you helped create, but it will be one of those people who were a victim of life and are now paying back the favor to someone, anyone, else.  If you help add to the corps of angry people then someday one of them will come back around and land in your life.  If you treat people kindly, there will be less angry people and the odds of you running into one will be less.  

 

The world would be such a better place if we could eliminate pain and suffering.  Well here is one area where we can do our part to not add to the pain of a fellow human being.  Whatever someone owns is theirs so we should leave it alone and help make the world a little better place.  God thought enough of our personal possessions to make it a sin for someone to steal them from us.  He is trying to protect them for us, so we should respect other peoples’ stuff as well and just leave it alone. 

 

I have to ask myself why would my little cigar clipper mean so much to God that he would make it a sin for someone to steal it from me?  Why would a $2.00 pair of earrings mean so much to God that he made it a sin when that maid stole them from my sister-in- law?  Why would my nephew’s Cub Scout pin mean so much to God that he made it a sin when that maid stole it from him?  I think the reason is that if these things mean that much to us then they mean that much to God, because these things are ours.  God loves us and wants us to be happy.