Worry and Treasures

A few years back our house was broken into while we were asleep in the bedroom. We really did not realize what had happened until we put all the evidence together.

One morning I noticed that the door facing was loose on one of the outside doors. I just thought that my wife had some trouble with the door sticking when she left for work. So I fixed the door facing and then forgot to say something to my wife for a couple of days.

A few days later I noticed a bush was crushed like someone had stepped on it. The bush was located under a window on our garage. I then noticed that something was wrong with the window. So, I walked into the garage to examine the window and I found that the window screen had been pushed in and that someone had probably crawled through it.

The door facing that had been loose a couple of days before was the door from the garage to the basement which is the entrance and exit to our home that we had always used the most. I did some looking around in the basement room next to the garage entrance and I found that a VCR was missing. Right beside the missing VCR was a video camera that was left alone. It appeared that nothing else was missing.

I guess we were very fortunate because we had been asleep while the thieves had been in our basement. They were probably scared off by our St. Bernard who was a house pet. So, we were safe and only one thing was missing.

The thought of thieves being in our home while we were also there was very unnerving. In fact, I became somewhat paranoid about it and obsessed about catching the thieves if they ever tried it again. We found out that the town had suffered from a rash of burglaries and that some homes had been broken into more than once.

So, I decided to put alarms on every entrance so that we would know if someone was breaking in. My wife became upset with me on several occasions because I constantly talked about the break-in and obsessed about it. I felt so violated that I even compared being broken into with being raped.

When I finally calmed down about the break-in, I realized that I was worried way too much about stuff or possessions. I realized that possessions are not as important as other things in life like family and faith. It made me examine my whole life.

I started really examining where my heart was in everything that I was involved with during the everyday aspects of my life. When I would find myself being obsessed by material things I would remind myself of the scripture found in Matthew 6:19-21 that discusses treasure that can be stolen by a thief and treasure that can not be stolen by a thief.

This experience constantly reminds me to examine where my heart is at all times. I am guilty most of the time of having my heart in the wrong place. I worry way too much about things that I can not control, when all I really need to do is to let my heart be in the right place and trust in The Lord to take care of things.

I need to strive for treasures in heaven that thieves can not take away from me.