In August of 1995, our special-needs son Peter finally took possession of a brand new, full-sized Ford van. It was completely accessible, with an automatic lift, and had hand controls, so that Peter, who was in a wheelchair, could drive it. It also had a removable driver’s seat, so that “regular people” could drive it too. Peter couldn’t have been prouder!

One Saturday evening in October, Pete’s van was sitting outside, and I went out to put it away in the garage. Peter was the last to have driven it, so there was no driver’s seat in it. Putting the seat in and taking it out was something of a hassle, so I’d just been getting down on one knee and using Peter’s hand controls to drive it into the garage.

This time, as I entered the garage, it was going a little faster than usual, I presume from the cooler temperature activating the automatic choke. I remember thinking, I’d better slow down, so I started to put on the brake. The only problem was that instead of pushing the control lever forward, which was the braking motion, I pulled it downward, which was the acceleration motion.

Instantly I had one of those “my-life-flashed-before-my-eyes” moments. Realizing that the front of the garage was only about twelve feet in front of me, and that the van was equipped with a very powerful V-8, I instinctively knew that there was no way I was going to be able to correct my error in time.

In a fraction of a nanosecond, I thought—very loosely paraphrased—Oh ______! This is not going to end well. I’m going to blow right through the front of the garage, go through the utility room, the kitchen, and, if I’m lucky, come to a halt in the family room.

Then a miraculous thing happened. The freezer! We had a chest freezer at the front of the garage, which was loaded with a quarter of a beef, plus other frozen items. As the van raced forward, the freezer—bless its heart—absorbed the bulk of the shock!

As I put the van in park and jumped out, the damage was less—much less—than I’d feared. The freezer was totally destroyed, but that was the least of my concerns at the moment. The center of the front garage wall had “only” moved forward about four inches, not the cataclysmic destruction I’d feared just a few seconds earlier.

Then I had my second premonition of the night. We lived in a brand new, beautiful home on the campus of the children’s home where we worked. We didn’t own the home, but were very thankful to have such a nice place to live. It occurred to me, The campus maintenance supervisor (a World War II marine vet) is not going to be happy about having our garage wall moved forward four inches, because I was stupid. He’s going to skin me alive. Then he’s going to nail my hide to the garage wall. Then while I’m staring at my hide on the wall, he’s going to kill me! And there was a part of me that couldn’t blame him.

Sandra and I quickly removed our frozen goods from the crumpled freezer and placed them temporarily in the campus’s big walk-in freezer. I figured I’d at least live through the rest of the weekend, then get killed Monday morning.

Monday morning came, and much to my relief, I didn’t get either skinned or killed. As the maintenance crew inspected the damage, it was actually much more easily correctible than I could have imagined, and they were able to fix it fairly quickly. And rather than being furious with me, they actually thought the whole thing was pretty funny. Of course, everyone liked Peter, and I figured that didn’t hurt me any.

As it turned out, the worst “damage” was to my reputation. I was the butt of lot of jokes about my driving ability for quite a while, but it eventually subsided. After 22 years, I thought everyone had pretty much forgotten about it, but apparently not. After reading He Made Us Better: A Story of Faith, Family, Friends (and Football), former next-door neighbor kid Todd Davis, asked me “Why didn’t you put that van story in the book?

Well, there you are, Todd.