God Will Never Abandon You
I date my mother every week.
And she loves telling me stories about her life.
So every week, I get a lesson in Philippine History.
Remember that my mother is 85 years old—and anything about her life is Philippine History.
When I was a little boy, I asked her, “Mom, did you see Jose Rizal?”
“Uh, that’s a little bit too early in Philippine History,” she said.
But last week, my Mom told me about the lowest point in her life…
The Bombs Were Falling From The Sky
“I got married during the Japanese war,” she said.
She was only 19 years old.
War was raging all around them. Japanese soldiers running around the city, looking for guerrillas. One million Filipinos will ultimately die because of that war.
Yet there they were, two lovebirds, getting married!
As if their problems weren’t enough, Mom’s mother was very sick. “I was an only child,” she said, “my father had died years ago. And Mama was totally bedridden, sick with tuberculosis…”
And six days after their wedding, bombs fell from the sky.
They heard the roar of American planes flying above, dropping their bombs all over Manila.
Everywhere they looked, homes and buildings were on fire.
Soon, their house caught fire as well.
“Bo, your father had to carry my mother in a wooden pushcart through the burning streets of Manila,” she said. “On the way, Japanese soldiers would block our road. We didn’t know where to go. But we kept running…”
All of a sudden, they saw a convent.
The gates were closed but they knocked anyway.
The nuns, seeing an old woman in a wooden “kariton”, welcomed them with open arms. “Those nuns were God’s answer to our prayer. God protected us there. If they didn’t accept us, I don’t know where we would have gone…”
They Had Nothing To Eat
One month after, my grandmother passed away.
So they brought out the pushcart again and pushed her to the cemetery.
And then my mother told me something I never knew before.
I’m 44 now and it’s the first time I heard this story!
Because it was wartime, they couldn’t find jobs. There came a point when they had nothing to eat anymore. Their cupboards were empty. Their wallets were empty.
Mom told me, “Everyday, your father and I would walk around the market, begging people to buy our tomatoes. We didn’t have a store or stall. We just walked with the tomatoes in our hands. It was the only way to put food on the table.”
Mom and Dad also foraged whatever little belongings they had left, and sold them all: plates, spoons, forks, anything that they owned which had value.
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