Envy at the Restaurant

1 of the trials that the Lord brought me through, in about 2013, I lost my mother to autoimmune hepatitis. It’s an autoimmune disease that attacks the liver. And about 6 months after that, I found out I had the same disease.

And so I had just carried my mom’s casket, I’d carried my grandma’s casket, who also died of autoimmune hepatitis. And so I knew where I was heading if I didn’t get a hold of this. And I was experiencing my symptoms at a much younger age than both of them were. And it’s interesting how each generation gets worse.

It hits them younger. Now we have kids with chronic illnesses now. And thank the Lord he intervened and he brought a lady into my life who was a Peruvian doctor who was able to reverse her own autoimmune disease and she took me under her wing and she showed me a lot, but I had to drastically change my diet.

And I mean we were already plant-based and you know that was kind of like without like, all right, you know, we’re done. That’s enough giving up food, Lord. I think that’s the max. And it went way more than that.

But it worked. But I remember shortly after we had changed our diet, we were walking around in Stanford, California.

This is where Stanford University is. And so you know what kind of income tax bracket we’re talking about here. And we’re walking down 1 of those streets, it’s like the main strip where all the nice restaurants are. And you got all these cute artsy boutiques and these really expensive clothing stores.

And we were walking down and you know just kind of enjoying ourselves it was evening and there was all these lights out and as we’re walking I’m looking in at restaurant after restaurant and these are beautiful restaurants I mean they have like perfect lighting you know there’s like this really nice woodwork some of them are really trendy And I see all these people sitting down at these gorgeous meals, eating whatever they want. You know what welled up in my heart? Envy.

Restaurant after restaurant, I just remember looking in there, we had just changed my diet and I was like getting used to this really strict diet thing. I remember thinking, you lucky dogs, eating whatever you want. And this is what we go through. We will look at those people that have what we want, and we feel envy.

We can even feel bitter and resentful. And it’s worse when those people are actually in our lives.

Poor Rachel, she had to live with this day after day. But you know, God gave me a remedy for that situation.

You know what God told me that helped me with that? He said, Gabe, look at all the people who have all the things you’re longing for and still aren’t happy. And you know I thought about it, I saw people who were eating whatever they wanted and I saw them more miserable than I was. Less peace in their life, less joy.

And I thought, thank you Lord, That’s a good test. I mean that’s a good lesson.