Prayer for Thieves

To the Angels who stole a lot from me in one way or the other:.I say this to you on a day neither cloudy nor oppressed by the elements below or above, nor distorted by the fog of time and memory.I say this to you with great clarity of mind and fondness of heart:.God Bless You!.

You have stolen my time, my money, my mind, my faith, trust, hopes and energy in any given order in the past and as many times as I've opened my heart to your supposed friendship and mercy.What it felt at the time as an offer of kindness and kinship, of noble intentions and generous altruism, has turned out to be nothing more than your sludge of ill will raining, your poisonous swamp of a life spent in conniving, pretending and scheming now bending, buckling, and twisting for petty advantages that death (both yours and mine) will one day surely wipe away sparkling clean like castles built on the sand.My only regret is that you have not stolen away from me more and any earlier.Your lesson of hurt and instruction of reality has been such an unfailing compass in my life that I wish you parted with those lessons earlier and not later.Today I'm a much better man for both avoiding the scorpions in my shoe and any inadvertent action on my part which may give false hopes to false projects and hurt others unknowingly even if I don't steal a pin.By the sheer magic of your magnificently bad example, you've thought me how to be the best person I can afford to be today.

If I did not learn anything else in this short and fleeting life, I think I've learned how not to be you -- the paramount do-or-die importance of not being you.And that's more than I can say I've imbibed from all the books I've devoured in my life or all the movies I've seen.Banks do not hold enough money and heavens do not store enough mercy to pay you back for your jolting kick-in-the-pants lesson that propelled me further in this life than I ever thought I'd get.

That's why I bless you today wherever you may be with all the gratitude in my heart and wish you could get the same shining lessons from your own cruelty that I had to learn in a hurry just to survive.But perhaps that's not possible. Perhaps, like a pair of scissors that cannot cut itself, perhaps your depravity is also incapable of cutting out the worst from your wound and leave behind only what is pure, fragrant and wholesome. For that I'm leaving your fate and fortune to the subtle grace of God.

May you be comfortable, my dear thieves, with what you've done to me and many others like me.May you be healthy like a horse and never sick like a man with a gentle conscience so you can continue to awaken others from their slumbers of the spirit as well, even despite themselves.Amen.

By: Ugur Akinci