Ron Gullion had a recurring dream about a two-hundred-fifty foot fir tree near his house. He dreamt the tree fell on his house, crumpling the roof and splintering through the living room and front bedroom with a sickening, thunderous roar. Each nightmare would wake him up in a drenching sweat. All his dreams were vivid and frightening. He warned his children to stay away from the old tree. Ron Gullion asked himself, “What do all these dreams mean?”
One day he noticed a twenty-foot dead limb dangling from the tree. A neighbor helped him cut the dead branch off. As Christmas approached the dreams subsided. Ron and Nita, his wife, returned home from Christmas shopping to find their nine-year-old daughter, Alison, had rearranged her bedroom. She had been talking about it for days but her mother asked her to wait until after the holidays. “I just wanted to get it done now,” she explained. On Christmas Eve it started to snow as the family made their way to church. “I hunched in the pew with my arms folded tightly,” Ron recalls, “thinking about whether I even believed that God was part of my life.”
It was near blizzard conditions by the time they reached home. Ron wasn’t asleep for very long when he heard a roar. The old fir tree had fallen on their house. Alison across the hall was crying for help. “Daddy, help! I’m stuck,” she called out. All Ron could see was branches, insulation, and hunks of ceiling strewn about the trunk. Somewhere in that mess Alison was crying, “Daddy, Daddy.” Soon the quiet night was filled with the sounds of rescuers with chain saws frantically sawing parts of the big tree in an effort to free Alison. Hours passed and still they were unable to free the girl. There was the threat of Alison succumbing to hypothermia. Ron began praying to the God whose very existence just hours earlier he had doubted. “Please, God,” he prayed, “spare her life.” With more equipment the rescuers finally freed his daughter. At the hospital the doctors said she would be all right.
The next day, Christmas Day, Ron and his son kicked through the rubble of their house. In Alison’s room he noticed that the bulk of the tree landed right where her bed had been before she had impulsively moved it. He noticed a scar on the tree and realized that it was from the dead branch he had felt such an urgency to remove. That branch might have killed her. Amid the rubble Ron wondered, “Had God been trying to warn me all along about the tree?”
Does God speak through dreams?
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Ron Gullion, “A Giant Beside Our House,” SNOWFLAKES IN SEPTEMBER (Nashville: Dimensions for Living, 1992), pp. 70-75. #2392
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Postscript: on October 8, 2003, I received this email:
Rev David,
As my family gave the rights to our story about the ‘Tree Fall’ and my father’s dreams to Guideposts, I have enjoyed searching on Google to find out what’s being published about it. In my research today, I came across your “Wisdom of Youth” message [ie, sermon] and your eloquent recap of our story.
I wanted to introduce myself to you. I am Alison Gullion, the 9-year-old girl that the tree fell on that Christmas night in 1983. I am honored to know that a story that has the hand of God written all over it is still being talked about today.
Thought you might be enchanted to know what’s come of the girl whose life was spared….I just celebrated my 29th birthday this year and will graduate this coming spring with a Masters Degree in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He was with me that night and continues to be with me today.
I am grateful my family’s story touched your heart enough to include it in your message years ago.
Godspeed to you,
Alison Gullion