The Pastor’s Piece – Pastor Kevin Cernek, FCFI Chaplain

March 1, 2026

Everybody, it seems, likes a good prank story. My prank started out spontaneous and was innocent enough at the beginning, but went south in a hurry. I was a teenager – probably about 16 years old. A friend and I were driving down a country backroad, he was driving, I was in the passenger seat. As we drove I noticed there was a house up ahead and a man was on the front porch busy doing something. I thought it would be funny if, as we went by his house, we both ducked down and honked the horn so it would look like no one was in the car as it drove past. For some crazy reason, my friend went along with it. So when we got near his house, I shouted “DUCK” and we both ducked laughing hysterically while my friend honked the horn. But suddenly there was a loud bang – like an explosion. Well, when my friend ducked, as his head went down toward the middle of the seat, he accidentally turned the steering wheel and the car veered into the man’s mailbox – crushing it. It was a direct hit. I mean, it was one of those scenes where you see the mailbox, the mailbox post, and a bunch of splintered wood, gravel, dirt, grass, and other miscellaneous ditch debris flying through the air in slow motion. My friend’s car was a Buick from the late 60’s or 70’s (before they were collector cars). It was built like a tank. It didn’t even dent the bumper. It was an innocent prank gone bad. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.

It took a second for the reality of the situation to kick in. Now instinct took over. I shouted to my friend: “Go! Go! Go!” He gunned it and we took off down the road as fast as we could go. When we got to a stop sign a couple miles away, I looked behind and could see a car racing after us. Oh no!

So we took off again, and in a short distance, took a sharp right turn onto a gravel road. I was the navigator and I figured the dust from the gravel would stop our pursuer and we’d be able to lose him. It worked. We lost him. And we worked our way back home ever-so-cautiously on the backroads. We didn’t tell our parents what we had done nor did we tell anyone else. But that night I couldn’t sleep. Not that night nor the next.

Finally, two days later, I got in dad’s pickup and went to the man’s house. When I got there, I saw he had a new post for his mailbox, but the mailbox itself was the same old one, only now it was all dinged up where he had hammered out the dents and remounted it. It looked like a casualty of war.

I told the man what we had done and apologized for fleeing and I was there to make restitution. He was skeptical of me, though gracious. He said he already had a post laying around, but the new mailbox cost him 10 bucks. I had very little money. I worked for my dad on the farm for a few bucks a week, just enough to put gas in my car and entertain with my friends once in a while. When I could, I’d milk for the neighbor for 5 bucks a milking. It took three hours twice a day to do his chores. So, ten bucks, was 6 hours worth of hard work. I paid him, told him I was sorry and left.

But the story doesn’t end there. That man later moved to Freeport and a few years later when my wife and I moved back to the area after school, I was asked to preach as a guest speaker at a small country church. When I got up to start my sermon, I looked out over the audience, and who should be sitting in the second row from the front just to my left? You guessed it – the man whose mailbox I had obliviated. To say that it threw me for a loop, and that I had a hard time concentrating would be an understatement. It was all of that and more. I was surprised to see him there, but I was happy at the same time. Later, that man’s daughter drove out to Martintown to our church and fell in love with our people and we with her. When I shared this story with our congregation, I identified the man and his daughter (both now deceased) and someone in our church said he knew the man, and after that close encounter, in his words: “You’re lucky to be alive. That man was a maniac.” Maybe so – but lesson learned.

I’ve often thought about how happy I am that I didn’t let my conscience become seared and let that misdemeanor go unchecked. I could have been carrying that guilt around with me all those years. Instead, although our reunion a couple decades later was a bit awkward at first, it turned out we became friends in the end – And God actually turned that nightmare into something productive.

I give the credit to God for not letting me sleep those two nights.

(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin)