Shanti is a fourth year high school student in Divine Word of San Jose College, San Jose, Occidental Mindoro.

I only heard of him from my mother.  Whenever I was faced with challenges in school, my mother always mentioned his name.  But I had not yet seen him in my life.

According to my mother, his and my family had been long-time neighbors in our town in the old days when there were still deer and flowers in the wild, and birds and butterflies to habitat the plants.

His name is known in our community and he is known in the school where I am presently studying. He belonged to the first year high school class when the school, then only an academy, opened in 1963.  In his time, the school had only one building compared to the many buildings now when I started my Grade I in 1996.

He is much older than me, even some years older than my mother.  In our school, he was active in academics, in extra curricular activities and in campus politics.  He was into reading, music and arts. In sports, he was into ping-pong, basketball, swimming and judo–karate.  And he was one of those activists before the martial law years.

After college my mother’s friend – they even treated each other as relatives – went to university and studied law.  When he returned to our hometown one summer time, he was already employed in the country’s premier investigative police agency – the NBI.

At the NBI, he met and moved with important people.  He saw the powerful and the influential who shaped the nation’s destiny.  Indeed, the city was full of wine, women and song.

But in a split second, an accident completely changed his life.  The result of the CT scan on his broken spinal column, as announced by the doctors, devastated him: ‘paralysis, in all probability, permanent.’  He was then 34, with two children aged two and three.

Back in our hometown, changes began to appear in his body.  His renal and rectal functions ceased to function.  All his right fingers stiffened.  His legs became thin and lost their sensation.  He could not even turn on his side without assistance.  At nights, rats, ants and cockroaches feasted on his feet and toes.  And massive bedsores appeared to eat his flesh.

What aggravated his sad condition was when he and his wife separated.  Because the couple parted with animosity, his wife denied him his children.  In his mother’s home later, he also felt the indifference of the other members of his family.  He sensed he was being considered a burden worth being dumped.  And my mother’s friend, who felt he was all alone in this cruel world, began to hate God.  He often asked at night, ‘God, why did you give me this wretched life?’ 

There was one option left for him to end it all – to take his life.

But the images of his children kept appearing in his sleep.  The images of the suffering Christ nailed on the cross and His weeping mother at the foot of the cross refused to leave him.  The scene at the crucifixion pestered him that one should remember God more when one is suffering.

And one night, when everything was still and everybody was asleep, my mother’s friend raised a simple prayer to heaven to ask God’s forgiveness. Tears flowing, he repented and accepted his fate – that long before he was born, his name was already written, he was already chosen by the Lord to help Him carry His cross.

He pledged to God that, in his condition now – physical body destroyed but with brains intact – he had to spend the remaining years of his life in the service of others, just as he had done when he was still in the government service.  That night, he asked God to give him the sign.

And God answered his prayers when one December day his two children stood by the door of his room.  They approached and climbed onto his bed, one on the left and the other on the right.

He embraced them, and smelled the sweet scent of innocence.  And when his children embraced him back, he whispered: ‘Ang ligaya ko po ngayong Pako.  Thank you Lord.’

This reunion with his children made my mother’s friend want to live again.  Since then, he changed his outlook in life.  If severe tests caused some men to break, my mother’s friend resolved to strengthen his moral courage and not to doubt again his faith in God.

For starters, he taught his left hand to write the ABC.  He also taught his left to hold the brush to paint – painting being his first love even when he was still a boy.

When a telephone was installed in his room, my mother’s friend went into radio reporting and aired to the public the people’s problems.  He fought for the people’s welfare, especially the poor, the voiceless, the oppressed.

To help the people more, he renewed his ties with the NBI; thus the NBI provided assistance in his hometown in investigating cases.  He helped the poor in filing cases.  By word of mouth, what he was doing spread and reached the neighboring towns.  And more people came to him for assistance.

I saw my mother’s friend for the first time on TV when Ms Korina Sanchez featured him in Balitang K. It was at this point that I asked my mother to bring me to him.

There he was, lying in bed.  His room was small and its ceiling low.  This was his world for the past 16 years.  It was true, his wasted body was permanently nailed to his bed.  Pity was the first feeling I felt toward him.

But when he smiled at me, I noticed his eyes sparked with certainty.  And when he spoke and let me into his mind, I saw his thoughts to be deep and his understanding of what life is far and wide.

I learned that he resolved to give more of his time to be of service to others.  I likewise learned that whenever people left his room with hope renewed and courage born, he realized the value of his life because people were affected by the way he lived a full life despite his limitations.  To him, this was the imposing meaning why God gave him what he, at first, thought was ‘a wretched life’ – to inspire others.

I would never forget when he quoted a line from a little book titled The Little Prince :  ‘And now here’s my secret, a very simple secret:  It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eyes.’

When I left his room, I felt humbled.  This man, my family’s long-time friend and neighbor, even relative, as they proudly announced, who once so hated God that he thought of taking his own life, found the power to renew his faith, and the power to keep it alive with the passion to live under that unshaken faith that God is always on his side.

My mother’s friend has come to worship Him.