But I was conscious, and very irritated, murmuring because the doctors did not come to me. But there was a moment in which I was calm, without complaining, because I saw Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was bent over and was very near to me, he touched my head with His hands and he consoled me. Are you able to imagine this?! Can you imagine the tenderness?! I thought: is it a hallucination? How is it possible to see Our Lord here?! I closed the eyes, then I reopened them, and I continued to see him there! He said to me, with great tenderness: “You see, my little one, you are about to die! Feel the need of My Mercy”. Just imagine…! And so he said: “Mercy! Mercy!”, but in the mean time I thought: why mercy? What bad have I ever done?
I was not conscious of my errors, but it was clear to me that I was about to die, this yes! About this I was sad… “Alas, I am about to die!!! … Alas, my diamond rings!!!” I immediately remembered my rings. I look, and I see the flesh of my fingers totally burned, as if they had exploded. But I said to myself: “I must take them off, cost what it may cost! Otherwise they will have to break them, and they will loose their value”. I did not think about anything else; I saw my fingers puffed up, and I thought only to take off my rings so that they might not break them! You cannot imagine what an unpleasant smell burnt flesh has. And the more I moved those rings, the more it stank. I felt that I would be crazy from the pain, but I insisted and I said to myself: “No! No and no! I must succeed in this! I must succeed, because to me, nothing can beat me, and this flesh will not swell, no sir! I am taking off these rings from here, cost what it may, I will not die with them”. When in the end I succeed to take them off, I remember suddenly: “Oh, no!!! I am about to die, and these nurses will steal my rings!” In the meantime arrives my brother-in-law. I, very happy: “Save my rings!!!” I handed them over to him, who is a doctor, and it could not be otherwise: because otherwise he would not have touched them, but he would have thrown them away, and far away! In fact they were burned, and with fragments of flesh attached. He said he would deliver them to Fernando, my husband, adding: “Tell my sisters to take my children because, the poor ones, they will be without Mamma. In fact, I will not make it!” The worst thing was that I did not profit from those moments that Jesus offered to me, to ask Him Mercy and pardon. But how could I ask pardon, if I thought I did not have sins?! I believed myself to be a saint! When we feel we are “saints”, it is then that we condemn ourselves.
When I had taken off the rings and had entrusted them to my brother-in-law, so that he might hand them over to my husband, I said to myself relieved: “Finally, now I can die!”, and the last thought was: “Alas, with what money will they bury me, given that my banking account was in the red?...”
God the Father loves everyone and each one, independently of the fact that we are good or bad; and with such an intensity that, even to the last moment, he comes even to us with so much tenderness, he embraces us with all of His Love… He wants to save us, but if we do not welcome Him, if we do not ask Him pardon and mercy, recognizing our faults, he leaves us free to follow that which we have chosen. If ours had been a life without God, most likely in that moment we will refuse Him, and He will respect us. He does not oblige us to accept Him.
And so one closes my Book of Life.
The Return
But when my Book of Life was closed, you cannot imagine how I felt: I was truly terrorized. I see myself with the head down, and I feel as if falling toward a pit. Then that thing is opened that seems like a hole, I fall inside, and terrorized I begin to cry out to all the saints to save me. You would not believe the quantity of saints that I began to name: St. Ambrose, St. Isidore, St. Augustine, etc. I did not even know how to recognize so many, as bad a Christian as I was! But when I finished the list of saints, I remained in silence… I felt an immense emptiness, a pain and an enormous shame, and I realized that no one could help me! And I said to myself: “… And all the people, on the earth, to think that I was a saint… To hope that I might die, in order to ask from me a grace. Where am I going, now?” I lifted up my eyes, and I met those of my mother. I felt so much sadness, a profound sorrow, because she would have wanted so much to carry me into the hands of God. With great confusion and suffering, I cried out to her: “Mamma, what a shame! I have condemned myself! Where am I going, I will never see you again!”
But in that moment, Jesus grants her a very beautiful grace: my mother was motionless, and God permits her to move the fingers, pointing them upwards, and inviting me to look up there: I look, and behold to come out of myself from the eyes of the crusts, frightfully painful. It was spiritual blindness which went away, and in that instant I saw there: a wonderful moment.
One day, one of my patients, said to me: “Doctor, I feel very, very much pain, much sadness, for you. Because you are too much of a materialist. But one day that you might find yourself in some affliction, or in a dangerous situation, whatever it might be, ask Jesus Christ that he might cure you with His Blood, and that you might ask Him for pardon: because never, never, will He abandon you, having paid the price of his own Blood for you”.
And so, with great shame and immense sorrow, I began to cry out: “Lord! Jesus Christ, have compassion on me! Forgive me, Lord, forgive me! Give me a second chance!”
It was the most beautiful moment, most wonderful! I do not have words to describe it. Because Jesus bent down and pulled me out of that pit! He lifted me and brought me to a level place, and he said to me, with much love: “Yes, you will return, and you will have your second chance… Not because of the prayer of your family, because it is normal that they cry and shout out for you, but because of the intercession of all the people unrelated to your flesh and to your blood, that have cried, prayed, and lifted up their own heart with so much love for you”. Do you know what I saw? I saw the great power of the prayer of intercession, brothers! Do you know how to be able to be always in the presence of the Lord? Pray everyday for your children, but pray also for the children of the people of the whole world! Pray for the others! In this way you will be in the presence of God, everyday.
I saw how thousands and thousand of little flames of light went up, so beautiful, to the presence of the Lord; they were little white flames, stupendous, full of love. They were the prayers of so many, so many people, that were praying for me, that had been moved after having seen on TV and in the newspapers what had happened to me, and that they were crying and offering Masses. The greatest gift that you can offer to someone is the Holy Mass. Nothing exists more efficacious, that can help someone, than a Holy Mass. It is also what God appreciates the most: to see His children intercede for their neighbors, and to help their own brother. The Holy Mass is not the work of man, but of God.
Among those little lights, though, there was an enormous one, very beautiful: a light much greater than all the others. You know, brothers, why I am now here? Why I returned? Because in my land exists a saint. I looked with curiosity, in order to know who that person might be that loved me so much, and the Lord said to me: “That man that you see there, is a person that loves you, much, and he does not even know you”. He showed me that it had to do with a poor peasant man, who lived in the mountains, in the Sierra Nevada of Saint Martha. This man was very poor; he did not have anything to eat. All of his harvest was burned, even the chickens that he had, had been stolen by the men of the “guerrilla warfare”. These last ones, wanted even to take into their service his older son. This peasant man went all the way down to the village to go to Mass. The Lord made me pay attention to the words with which he prayed: “Lord, I love you! Thank you for health, thank you for my children! Thank you for all that you give me! Be praised! Glory to You!”
His prayer was only praise and rendering thanks to God! The Lord made me see how in the wallet he had a 5,000 pesos bill, and a 10,000 pesos bill, and this was all that he possessed! Do you know what he did…? He gave the 10,000 bill at the offertory! I would put only a 5,000 pesos bill, and that when someone gave me a false bill, at work!
He, instead, did not give the 5,000 bill, but the 10,000 bill, even though this money was all that he had! And he was not discontented, nor did he grumble due to his poverty, but he thanked and praised God! What an example, brothers! Afterwards, he went out of the church, he went to buy a piece of blue soap (washing soap); he wrapped it in a piece of newspaper (“O Espectador”), of the day before. There was the news of my accident, and the photograph where I appeared totally burned.
When this man sees the news, as he reads it slowly, being moved he cries so much, as if I were someone very dear to him, and prostrate with the face to the ground, he beseeches God with all of his heart, saying: “Father, my Lord, have compassion on this my little sister, save her, save her Lord! Lord, if You save her, if you save my little sister, I promise you to go to the “Sanctuary of Buga” to release the vow, but save her. Please, Lord, save her!” Think about it, that man so poor, who was not cursing, nor lamenting for suffering hunger with his family, but on the contrary was praising and thanking God… And with a capacity to love the neighbor so great that, even having nothing to eat, he was disposed to cross the Country in order to fulfill a promise, in favor of someone he did not even know!
The Lord said to me: “This is true love of neighbor! It is like this that you must love the neighbor…” And it was there that he gave me this mission: “You will go back, to give your testimony, that you will repeat not a 1000 times, but a 1000 x 1000. Woe to the one, listening to you, who will not change, because he will be judged with greater severity. And this applies also to you, in your second return, for the religious who are my priests, and for whoever else that does not listen to you: because there is no greater deaf person than the one who does not want to hear, nor a worse blind person than the one who does not want to see”.
This, my dear brothers, is not a threat, on the contrary! The Lord does not need to threaten us. This is a second chance that I have, and it is also for you. This shows that God is in love with us, and puts before our eyes this mirror which is I, Gloria Polo. Because God does not want that we condemn ourselves, but rather that we live with Him, in Paradise. But for this, we must let ourselves be transformed by Him. When our hour will arrive, to leave this world, also to each one of you will be opened the “Book of Life”; when you will die, all of you will pass through this moment, just as I passed through it. There, we will see exactly as now, with the difference that we will also see our thoughts and our sentiments, our acts and their consequences, our omissions and consequences of them… All in the presence of God. But the most beautiful thing is that each one will see the Lord face to Face, that he asks us to convert ourselves: up to the last moment he asks us this, so that in truth we begin to be new creatures with Him, because without Him we could not do it!
Physical Recovery
When the Lord made me return, my kidneys did not function, nor did they do for me the dialysis because it was not worth the effort, from the moment that I was about to die… But suddenly, they began to function; the same for the lungs, and also the heart began to beat strongly. You can imagine the astonishment of the doctors! By then I did not need the machines!
I began my physical recovery, but I did not feel anything alive below, and after a month the doctors said to me: “Gloria, God is doing a miracle with you, because your skin has grown back over all the wounds… But as for your legs we cannot do anything. We must amputate them!” When they said this to me, I, who was a sportswoman, I remembered: 4 hours of daily acrobatics, for what? … I thought only of fleeing from there, but I did not succeed, because the legs did not hold me up, and I fell. I was hospitalized on the 5th floor, and they took me to the 7th floor to stay there until the surgery; I found there a lady who had her legs already amputated, but they had to amputate them again, higher up. Seeing her, I thought that not even all the money in the world was sufficient to buy those wonderful things which are the legs. When they told me that they would amputate them, I felt a great sadness! Never had I thanked God for my legs, on the contrary: with the tendency that I had to get fat, I suffered hunger as a fool and I spent fortunes to be elegant… And now, I see my black legs, burned, without flesh, but for the first time I thank God to have them yet. “Lord, I thank you for my legs, and I ask you for the grace to leave them for me, so that I might be able to walk. I beg you, Lord, leave to me the legs!” And I immediately began to feel them: they were very black, without circulation, and from Friday to Monday, when they arrived, the doctors were surprised, because they were red and the circulation was back in place! Astonished, they touched me and they did not want to believe. I said to them: “Doctors, my legs hurt terribly, but I believe that there is no one in the world, so happy to feel pain in the legs, as I am in this moment!” The doctor on the 7th floor replied to me that never, in 38 years of service, had he seen anything similar.
The other two miracles that the Lord did for me, was the breasts and the ovaries. The doctor had said that I could no longer have babies. I was happy, because I thought that God had given me a natural method to not get pregnant. But, one and a half years later, I see that my breasts began to grow, to expand and to be reformed. I was amazed, and when I went to the doctor, he said to me that I was expecting a baby! And with these breasts I nursed my daughter!!!...
To God nothing is impossible!
Conclusion
May the Lord bless everyone, immensely. Glory to God and glory to Our Lord Jesus Christ. May God bless you!