Confronting My Elephants

By all accounts this is a story of survival; a life-affirming testimony to the faith and determination of a child who becomes a man through failings and short-lived victories. But with a deeper scope this is also a call to live life out loud, a bullhorn to stomp the stampede of self-defeat.

Rubi Ho is a Vietnam transplant, who was shown at the earliest of ages the skills and heart of tenacity and the brawn of overcoming obstacles. His mother led herself and eight children out of Saigon in 1975, one day before the fall. Their country in shambles, they fled and landed in the United States, where they clung to hope and the heart-sleeves of a kind-hearted, God-filled couple. Given a new opportunity to start again, the family began to plant themselves and bring forth fruit, new jobs, compassionate friends, and the never-ending togetherness of the family thread. Naturally, the challenges did not end, as is life, and Ho takes his readers on a voyage woven with missteps, mistakes, and grief, and the redemption of a life lived through God, and not self.

Further into the journey readers may relate to the feeling of being ‘different,” or most aptly ‘feeling different’ and the mental hardship it results in. Ho’s feelings of inadequacy and differentness are far from foreign.

Elephants can be ways of thinking, addictions, or behaviors, and they can become larger than our true life purposes, trampling a life not yet defined. This tie makes for a vital key in the relationship between reader and writer; Ho applies his life story to that of the reader by inviting us into his world and opening it up for speculation into our own.

Here stands a man, strong in his own abilities and, yet stumbling through life, trampled by self-defeating thoughts and paralyzing theories. He leads us further into his examinations through the word of God, and ultimately how only a true relationship with our Creator can lead us to the defined life that we so desperately seek: a life free of anxiety, pressure to be ‘more’ and the colossal weight of our elephants.

Ho’s story is refreshing; it speaks boldly and unapologetically, ardently laced with a tone of thanks and grace. It is encouragement for the lost and afraid, a life-affirming tale of true surrender and claim. Confronting My Elephants is for anyone who knows there is more to the life they have called for themselves, there is a life created for them by One who has no limits.