Your Life Is Not A Theft

The night brings a terrible accounting, a ledger where your breath feels like a debt you can never repay. You sit in the gathering dark and wonder why you are still here when the ones you loved are gone.

It feels like theft to draw another breath, like survival is a crime against the silence they left behind. But listen — the light does not keep a ledger of the living and the dead.

There was a woman who lost a silver coin, just one, and she did not count the nine that remained as enough. She lit a lamp.

She swept the entire house, searching carefully until she found what was lost. And when she found it, she did not apologize for the joy.

She called her neighbors and said: rejoice with me. The light is not asking you to mourn in the dark forever.

It is asking you to let your life be the coin that was found. Your existence is not a theft.

It is the thing the light swept the house to find.