A Tree Fell on my Van!
by Oliver Carlos
The year 2002 was very memorable for me. The President was Gloria, and there was a typhoon named Gloria. That storm was really strong. While still in the Pacific, before it even hit land, the winds were already felt in Laguna as signal no.3 strength.
I was a professor at UPLB DevCom at that time. Classes went on even though the winds were already howling over the campus. The rains weren’t heavy though, so maybe that’s the reason why classes weren’t suspended. I had a class at 1 PM. At around 1:30 PM an officemate knocked at our door and asked if anybody owned a red van. I said I owned one. Then he said that I better check out the parking lot if it’s my van that got crushed by a fallen tree.
I stopped the class and rushed to the parking lot. My curious students followed behind. As I was briskly walking out the building, images of how I parked my van earlier flashed in my mind. I knew I parked it a good 5 meters from the nearest tree. How could a tree fall on it?
When I reached the parking lot, I was shocked. A big tree indeed fell on my van! What was weird was that my van was the only vehicle parked in the whole parking lot. The tree could have fallen to the left or right of the van, or even to the opposite direction, but it fell exactly on my poor little red van. There were 360 different angles on where the tree could fall, but it fell “sapul” or “exakto” on my cute baby. It was like a giant karate chop that hit my van.
The van was wedged between the tree and the ground, and it took about an hour for the campus maintenance crew to extract it by using power saws to cut the wood into smaller lighter pieces. My consolation was that I was not inside the van when the accident happened. The tree trunk fell directly overhead the driver’s seat.
My friend Kuya Mante Pangilinan towed my van. Passing along Grove and Lopez Avenue was like a walk of shame. People were looking at the pitiful sight. I didn’t want to have my dilapidated van parked in my garage, so I asked Kuya Mante to park it in my father’s house. I didn’t want to see that mess each morning I would wake up, so I had it hidden from my sight. I couldn’t look at it for 2 weeks. My Dad just called me one day and asked me to get it out of his garage.
I didn’t know what to do. The van didn’t have insurance, only TPL. I had to get it repaired sheerly from my own pocket. That was a time in my career that my salary was just break even with my expenses. I didn’t know how it happened, but it got repaired anyway, by God’s grace.
Reflecting on the whole experience, I see myself as like the men who built the Tower of Babel. They had the wrong motives for their grand construction plan. They wanted to make a name for themselves. So God came into the picture and caused them to stop and scatter. We read in Genesis 11:1–9 (NIV):
“….Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; ….So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.”
I had to admit that I treated my van like my god before that incident. I think about it all the time. I polish it clean inside and out almost every day. I put lots of decorations too, so as to make it the coolest van in town. I was looking for the applause of men. In my conversations with friends, I started taking the glory to myself for having a beautiful van, I stopped mentioning God as its source. Taking care of things is good, but if done too much, to the point that it becomes the number one thing in my heart, ahead of God, is not good. God sent me back to my senses with that fallen tree.
My life changed after that event. I became extra careful when I’m experiencing great success or having fancy earthly possessions. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of making a name for myself, of exalting myself. I would always check my motives and do things to exalt God, not me. I don’t want to build another Tower of Babel that God would later flatten.
This lesson of humility is also reverberated in the New Testament. In I Peter 5:5 (NIV):
“God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
