Honor Thy Father and Mother

More insights from the Gloria Polo testimony

I don’t know about you, but I love books that challenge me and show me something new about myself… or help unveil things that maybe I already knew about myself but hadn’t looked at too closely.

I mentioned the book, Struck by Lightning—The Testimony of Gloria Polo, in my previous blog post, but I want to pick it up again because it hit home for me in so many ways. One of the most emotionally charged was the part where Gloria describes how entitled and spoiled she became and how ungrateful toward her parents and especially toward her mother. Having risen from a poor home to become a successful dentist, she came to despise the lowly place she had risen from. She brings this up several times in the book, but this one hit me the hardest:

In my Book of Life [that is, her life review shown to her by God at her death], I saw something that happened when I was small and my family was very poor. My mother often cooked beans, and I detested them. I would say, “Again these cursed beans? One day, I will be so rich that I will never eat them again.” I saw that one time I threw out the beans that mamma had served me, without her seeing. When she sat down to eat, she noticed that my plate was empty. She thought that I had eaten in a hurry because I was very hungry, and she served me another helping, giving to me the portion that was reserved for her; so she ate nothing.

I cried so hard when I read that… because that was me.