“Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God.”
1 Corinthians 4:5 (RSV)
An author once wrote a book about the first wave of Mexican immigrants to Chicago in 1917. The stories of those immigrants who first settled in Chicago were collected from various sources. One of those sources was a young Mexican woman who kept a hand written diary documenting her family’s history, faith in God, and their effort to leave the turmoil of the Mexican revolution at the time. Her name was Elidia Barroso and she was my late husband’s aunt.
As I read excerpts from Elidia’s diary in the book, I started to piece together the traumatic events that affected their youngest brother more than anyone else. The Spanish flu pandemic at the time, was taking millions of lives globally, and it took the lives of Elidia’s mother and father. She became the responsible oldest sister of four orphaned children in Mexico. Elidia and her two sisters migrated to America in search of work to support themselves and their little brother, Peter, who was only six years old at the time.
Elidia and her sisters didn’t encounter Customs and Border patrol in those days, since the organization wasn’t created until 1924. Mexicans only needed to pass a literacy test and pay the eight dollar head tax, to enter the United States.
With both parents dead, the older sisters dropped Peter off at the home of a distant relative in Texas, as the three girls migrated to Chicago to search for work. Peter’s life went from a happy, carefree childhood, living with his family on a ranch in Mexico, to becoming a scared and confused orphan, living in a new country, learning a new language with relatives he hardly knew.
He was later reunited with his older sisters in Chicago, who raised him to adulthood. He eventually outlived his sisters, married and had a family of his own. He was not an easy person for his own three sons to understand, since he never talked about his childhood of loss and separation. His sons only knew their father as a harsh, abrasive and complex man. His middle son was my late husband, Stephen. I never met Peter, his father, since he died before we married.
Only God knows what pain people have hidden in the dark corners of their life. The scripture today warns us not to pronounce judgement before the time, that only God can bring to light the things hidden in the darkness.
It was Elidia Barroso’s diary, which brought out what was previously unknown about Peter’s traumatic childhood, which shed much light on his complex personality as a father.
Today, whenever I am tempted to judge somebody, I think of Peter, the scared, lonely child who lost both his parents and was separated from his sisters at the age of six, and how a disrupted childhood may affect a life.
If we could see every person in the light of their personal struggles or through the eyes of an all knowing God, we would probably never judge anyone again. God brings to light the things hidden in the darkness, sometimes disclosing what is really in a person’s heart. Having a brief glimpse of the pain and loneliness in someone’s life, gives us the eyes of mercy to better understand who that person really is.
Lord, enlighten our minds and give us a heart of mercy toward those who we tend to misjudge today. Give us the light of understanding so we may see people through your eyes. Amen
