This is it—this is the end of me, I told myself. I was facing danger and there was no time for me to run away from it.
A mentally-challenged man had opened the lids of two liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tanks that were being readied for cooking at a tiangge. They could have exploded in my face if someone had lit a cigarette. But I was unmindful of what was happening around me. People were running around in all directions, but I just walked on—toward the tanks. Two large gas tanks emitting gas! Realizing the predicament I was in, I was too stunned to run for my life. Luckily, a brave man ran toward the tanks to close the lids. I could only whisper my gratitude to God for saving me from a gas explosion.
This incident happened while I was on my way to church in my hometown in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya. I love walking around this town where I was born and grew up in. I would go to church and roam around familiar places, particularly St. Mary’s University, where I took my elementary and high school education. I now work in Manila and that homecoming was one of the rare times I went home for a vacation.
All of us experience on-the-brink-of-death moments—some do not make it back to life, others miraculously survive.
Think, for example, of plane crashes. Among the most familiar, for us, was the plane crash in 1957 that killed President Ramon Magsaysay and all his companions in the plane, except one—Nestor Mata, a journalist. Then there was in 2012 the plane carrying then-Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo, who was on his way home to Naga to visit his family from a conference in Cebu.
Robredo and two pilots died, but his aide Don Abrasado survived the crash.
Sometime ago, a passenger plane crashed in the Peruvian jungle. The plane was flying over the Amazon rainforest when it was caught in a thunderstorm and a bolt of lightning hit one of the fuel tanks. All 92 passengers and crew were killed, except 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke. She fell off the plane still strapped to her seat. She awakened the next morning on the floor of the rainforest.
All these incidents may hold mysteries, but we know God intervenes in our lives. Maybe all those people who died in accidents had completed their mission in life. A lot of people, young and old, die of illnesses, foremost of which are cancer and heart attack. Some people die senselessly.
A lawyer-friend of my husband who was only 42 years old died while practice shooting. He was with a friend and a soldier who, my husband’s friend did not know, was a shell-shocked victim from the Mindanao wars. Upon hearing the sound of gunfire, the soldier grabbed the lawyer’s gun and shot the two people around him. My husband had wanted to join them that day, but before he could leave the house there was a heavy downpour, so he decided to just stay home and rest. He could have been one of the casualties.
People die of deep depression, too—when it leads them to take their own lives. Only God knows the depth of sadness and sorrow these poor souls go through, and perhaps He actually allows some of them to go the way they choose to make life easier for them and their families.
But I know of a young man who was left by his beautiful wife. He tried to end his life through many different ways but to his surprise, he survived every attempt. God must have wanted to tell him his wife was not worth dying for.
And remember the Madoffs of Wall Street? Bernard Madoff, a former Nasdaq chair and founder of a Wall Street firm named after him, operated the largest Ponzi scheme in history. When the scandal broke open, some people who had invested their life savings in his project committed suicide, including his son Mark. Bernard and his wife Ruth drank a bottleful of sleeping pills, each hoping to end their lives. But they woke up the following day. Bernard was sentenced to 150 years in prison and to pay $170 million in restitution.
In my case, God had saved me not just from being blown to smithereens by an LPG explosion; He had saved me several times before that. I have been inflicted several times with serious diseases—pneumonia, ulcerative colitis and others which doctors had difficulty diagnosing, but I survived them all.
The worst dying act would have been when I went mountain climbing with a group of foreigners in Calgary, Canada, and fell from a mountain steeped in snow. While falling I prayed that God would not let me die among strangers, and amazingly enough on my way down, I was caught on the edge of a crevasse and held on to it for dear life. A Canadian mountain climber came down to help me get to safe grounds.
People say that “the good die young.” I thank the Lord for giving me opportunities to do good before He takes my soul to join other good souls who have earlier left for the afterlife. Thank you, God, for the gift of life and the blessings that go with it.
Sylvia Europa-Pinca is president of Europa Public Relations.