Sheila loved to testify. It was only fair since the Lord had been good to her and kin. For the three years she spent at school, she encountered one fabulous miracle after another. First, her father bought the latest car model. Who else could have provided the money if not God? Not to say that God dropped the money from heaven as he dropped manna for the Israelites in the desert. Sheila was very clear about the fact that her father was materially rich. In fact, Sheila’s father had never faced the pangs of poverty; he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. As a child, one of the games he had played was setting his pocket change on fire just to see how it burns. Compared to her father, Sheila was modest. She could never be caught dead burning money. Whenever she had extra walking around money (and she always did), she gave to Charity. We knew this because whenever she gave, she would testify about it and name names. She would have preferred that the girls she temporarily rescued from their poverty shout it on the rooftops. But since those ungrateful poor students wouldn’t tell the whole school about her goodness, she had to do it herself. Otherwise, she would have risked being an unsung hero. Another vivid example about Sheila’s modesty was that she hated being chauffeured in her father’s car. She wanted to go to the mall by bus like the peasants but her father would say no and then proceed to give her loads of cash to spend. She was very emotional about the lack of freedom to live a normal life and to walk in the footsteps of the poor. And then tragedy struck. One day while she was upstairs in her bedroom just bored and sad about her fabulous life, not interested in being in the swimming pool or shopping or generally doing anything ‘rich’, she heard a bang. She rushed downstairs to find that the TV had come loose and cracked the floor, after which the TV itself broke to pieces. The floor would have been repaired with ease had it not been for the fact that the tiles had been imported from some Asian country and they were a limited edition. Her father called the manufacturer only to find that they didn’t have those specific tiles anymore. The situation was cumbersome. The only way out of this terrible mess, Sheila recounted, was to replace all the tiles in the house. But this took time as there was shipment involved. In the meantime, they had to deal with a patch of crack in the living room floor. It was embarrassing having to explain to the visitors why the floor looked bad. But like always, the Lord performed a miracle and the new tiles arrived and the old ones were replaced and Sheilah didn’t have to feel embarrassed about a cracked floor anymore. Such were the testimonies of an ostentatious rich girl. We called her Shallow Sheila.
