Welcome to our series You're Not Alone, in which Allen Sonter, for many years a missionary educator in the islands of the South Pacific, tell stories that help us to know that God is always watching over us wherever we are.
This episode is entitled An Angel in Control. Not only does this God who loves us answer us when we call to Him, but because he loves us when we commit our lives to Him, he will look after us even when we haven't time to think about what's happening to us.
Our story this week comes from Mbuda Bay on the island of Vanu Levu in Fiji. At the time, I was in charge of a combined primary and junior secondary boarding school situated on the edge of the bay. The main school grounds occupied a fairly flat triangle of land between two ridges that ran down to the edge of the water.
Several of the buildings were set close to the lower slopes of the ridges, while others were constructed on flat platforms cut higher up, and these buildings were connected by roads cut into the steep slopes. On one ridge, the road sloped upwards for perhaps 300 meters and then made a hairpin bend, still rising as it doubled back about 100 meters along the ridge toward a house at the top. Because the area received fairly high rainfall for most of the year, the grass grew quickly, and it was quite a job keeping it under control.
We had an old Fordson tractor and a slasher, and one of its tasks was to clean up the edges of the roads. I had taught one of the teachers to drive the tractor, and at the time of our story, it had been several months since I had driven the tractor myself, so I was unaware that the brakes were no longer working effectively. On the day of the incident, the teacher, Mozesi, not his real name, was using the tractor to slash the grass on the edge of the road that had the hairpin bend partway up.
He had worked up one side of the road to the top and had started back down on the other side, about 30 meters from the bend. He decided that he should use a higher gear for the downward leg, so he slipped the tractor out of gear. That old tractor did not have a live power takeoff, so the inertia of the slasher blades kept the shaft in the gearbox turning, preventing Nazesi from getting the tractor back into gear.
In his inexperience, he had not realized that this would happen on the slope. The tractor began to move under its own weight, and with Mazesi still wrestling with the gear lever, soon picked up speed. Mizessi pressed his foot as hard as he could on the brakes, but alas, they slowed him not a bit.
At this point, Mazesi was moving slowly enough to have run the tractor into the gutter on the edge of the road. And brought it to a stop against the bank. But again, his lack of experience caught him out and he could think of nothing except keeping the tractor on the road.
As he neared the hairpin, he was still moving slowly enough to take the corner, so he steered the machine around the sharp end and was then horrified to see the road stretching out seemingly endlessly down the slope in front of him. The gradient of the lower leg of the road was much steeper than the upper leg, so the tractor rapidly gained speed. Once the bend had been turned too late, Mosesi realized his mistake.
The tractor was out of control and he had no way of stopping it. About 50 meters down from the bend was a large dead tree just off the road. As the bank sloped downwards, the Zeshi decided to aim for the tree, hoping it would bring the tractor to a stop.
For some reason the tractor just wouldn't go where he was trying to steer it, and he missed the tree just as well as it was travelling so fast by now that if it had hit the tree there would have been serious damage and Mozesi might well have been killed. When he missed the tree, Mosesi thought to himself, this is where I die. And he shut his eyes and froze on the steering wheel.
From that point he made no attempt to direct the machine. It was about this time that I became aware of the drama unfolding up the hill. I was standing on the main road below, near the shore of the bay, talking to Sakyusa, a senior teacher.
We heard a series of thumps and crashes as the tractor careened down the road. The surface was rather stony and uneven, and as the sasha moved over the ground, the stones caused it to start bouncing. It would leave the ground and then come crashing down several meters further on, only to bounce up again and repeat the action.
The faster the tractor moved, the larger the bounces and crashes became. As Sakiyusa and I looked to where the sounds were coming from, we were horrified at what we saw. The speeding tractor, with its plunging slasher, was bearing down the steep slope, traveling straight for Sakiyusa's house, in which his wife was working.
The house was near the bottom of the slope and just above it the road took a turn of about 45 degrees toward the bank to follow around the base of the ridge between the road and the house there was a small flat garden area before the bank fell away steeply to the house. Any vehicle coming down the road and failing to take the turn would cross the garden and land right on the house and that was what the tractor appeared certain to do. We stood frozen to the spot as this out of control monster bore down upon the house.
We didn't have time to shout a warning to Sakuza's wife and even if we had, there wasn't time for her to get out. The house was built with a light wooden frame and floor about eight by 4 meters, with two small rooms. The walls were of plattered bamboo and the roof was of light corrugated iron.
It offered no protection at all and would be flattened by the weight of the tractor. The tractor came thundering down toward us and began to cross the flat garden area above the house. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, it turned sharply to the right toward the bank.
This took it back across the road and with a final plunge it came to rest in the only spot down the whole ridge where the bank was not just a near vertical wall beside the road. At the point where the tractor dived across the road there was a shallow basin like depression between the road and the bank, where the bank seemed to have receded from the road for four or five metres. The final leap brought the tractor to a stop, still upright with massesi still in the seat, though stunned and shaken and the engine still running.
The sudden quiet after all the crashing and thundering roused Sakusa and me from our inactivity, and we ran up to where the tractor was sitting with the engine slowly turning over, making a ticking noise as the fan tipped the cowling on one side where it had been shaken out of place by the violent jolting of the plunge down the hillside. Climbed slowly from the seat, almost in a dream. He was obviously dazed and didn't seem to know what he was doing.
I reached over and pulled the stop control of the engine, putting an end to the ticking of the fan, and then turned attention to Mazessi. After a while he seemed to regain his senses and bit by bit the story came out about the events leading to this near disaster. When Mozesi had settled down and it seemed clear that he had suffered no real injury, we inspected the tractor and slasher.
Incredibly, the front end of the tractor appeared to have suffered only a shaking that had displaced the fan cowling a couple of centimeters. Bit of a push soon rectified that at the back the adjustable support for the right hand arm of the three point linkage had previously been broken and welded and this weld had broken a few minutes in the workshop. This was repaired.
The slasher was undamaged. Despite the fact that the accident had been caused entirely by human error, partly negligence and partly lack of experience, there were definite signs that God had intervened to avert disaster. There appeared to be no physical reason for the tractor to change direction as it crossed that smooth, flat piece of ground above the house.
Mzessi certainly didn't steer it as he was sitting frozen to the wheel with his eyes shut and there was no unevenness of the ground to cause it to turn. A woman would no doubt have been killed if it had gone straight ahead. And why did the tractor come to rest at the only place down the whole length of the road where it would not have smashed its nose against the bank, causing severe damage to the machine, an injury, or worse, to Moses? I believe that God sent angel to take control of the situation, even though things happened so fast that I doubt anyone had time to ask God for help.
I'm certainly glad we have a God who is always there and who loves us and helps us even when the trouble we get into is our own fault.
You've been listening to our series You're Not Alone stories told by Allen Sonter that help us to know that God is always watching over us, wherever we are. If you have any comments or questions, send an email to
[email protected] or give us a call within Australia on zero two four nine seven, three three four five.
Six. May God bless you and remember you are not alone. You have been listening to a production of Three ABN Australia australia Radio.
