Article July 11, 2011 Issue

Prayer after a robbery

Constance Corrigan

When we were first married in the late 1970s, my husband and I had a small two-story home in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan—a lovely suburb of Detroit. My husband, who taught during the school year, used to do various jobs in the summer to earn extra money. 

One summer he was a security guard and consequently got up very early at around 4:00 a.m. to get ready for work. The alarm went off one morning, and we heard a noise downstairs. We went down, and our side door was open. The cord on our downstairs telephone had been cut. We realized there had been an intruder in our house. It seemed that the alarm had startled this person, and they’d left with a handmade clock from our mantel (a wedding present), a calculator from the coffee table (which was borrowed from my job at an advertising agency), and some money from my purse. We reported this to our local police.

I called my mother immediately. She instantly told me—and I accepted it—that since I could not lose God, I could not lose anything. I quickly realized that I also had to feel Christly love for this individual. God could not make anyone with the inclination to intrude or take things that didn’t belong to them. I began to see this individual as the man of God’s creating, pure and spiritually perfect. I immediately loved God’s honest man. Both my mother and I prayed along these lines for several hours, until I felt such a sense of peace and harmony and trust that God was in control. 

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