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

FCFI
August 16, 2026

Before I was married, I attended UW Platteville majoring in Agricultural Education. I thought I might become an ag teacher. But partway through, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I left school and went to work instead. A short while later I met my wife, and we got married. About a year or so into our marriage, God began working separately in each of our hearts, eventually bringing us to the same place. I was quietly exploring the possibility of going to Bible college when one day my wife said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking – you need to go to Bible college.”

I was ready.

We chose a school in Phoenix, Arizona, what is now Arizona Christian University. We had never been to Phoenix. We didn’t know a soul there. All we had was the phone number of a pastor we had never met and a church we had never been to and a letter of acceptance to our school.

So, we packed all our earthly belongings into the back seat of our old, worn-out, purple and white Mercury Monarch and headed west. Before we left, I mentioned our plans to a friend. I told him that we planned to move to Arizona, get a second-shift job, pay all our bills as we went – including tuition – and go to school during the day. His response was very negative. He told me I was being overly-ambitious and I couldn’t just expect that my life would simply fall into place like that and operate that smoothly.

I also told another trusted family friend. She told me that she had a friend in Arizona who had said there was flooding everywhere, people were leaving the Valley of the Sun, and were heading for the high country looking for shelter. It was a bad idea for us to go there.

That was encouraging!

Actually, it was pretty discouraging and I regretted telling them about our plans because in spite of what they said, I still sensed God’s call on our lives to go. So, the day after Thanksgiving, my lovely wife and I set out on the first leg of our life’s adventure together. We had $1,200 in cash in our pocket, and a debt of another $1,200 I owed to a generous uncle.

When we arrived in Phoenix, we found a pay phone at 19th Avenue and Thunderbird. For those of you who don’t know what a pay phone is, (or should I say, was?) it was a phone in a little booth with slots in it where you dropped in quarters every minute or so when the operator told you that you had to. You just kept plunking money in or she would cut you off.

Fortunately, we had a few quarters on us and I called the pastor whose number we had been given. He didn’t know anything about us, and he didn’t even know the person who had given us his number. That also was encouraging! But he gave us the number of an elderly couple in his church.

So, before we ran out of quarters, I called that number. A gracious lady answered the phone, and without even knowing us, she and her husband invited us to live in their camper in their backyard until we could get our feet on the ground. The camper was totally stocked with food – which we quickly discovered was quite stale and infested with mites and bugs. So we tossed all that out and fumigated the place and made sure the gracious couple never found out about it. They were so happy to help us and kind and generous, it would have broken their hearts had they known.

For the next several weeks, that was our home. But a few weeks later, our cash was getting pretty low. I told my wife: “When we get down to just enough money to put gas in the car to get us back home, we’re leaving.” I had a job waiting for me back on the farm if we needed it.

I didn’t want to go back, not because there was anything wrong with going back home, but because I knew my brothers would laugh at me because we couldn’t make it in Arizona. So we looked for work everywhere but nobody was hiring. We were just about out of money. Then one night, while attending an evening church service, I noticed that the song leader was wearing a sweater with a company logo on it.

He was a very large man. After the service, I asked him about the logo on his sweater and whether he carried any weight at his company? In the context of his size, my wife was absolutely flabbergasted that I would phrase it the way I did! But he was unphased and told us that he was the head of Human Resources and said, “If you come down to my office tomorrow morning, I’ll give you both a job.”

That was our launching point. And the rest is history. He has since gone home to be with the Lord. But I look back on that story and realize that although we didn’t have a perfect plan and we didn’t have a lot of money, and we didn’t know anybody, and our car was a piece of junk (the day we rode into town the transmission overheated and puked out all the fluid on the driveway of our new landlords). And although we didn’t know how it was going to work, and there were plenty of people who thought we were making a foolish decision, God was the One leading us – and when we look back, we can see the good hand of our God was upon us. That’s exactly what Nehemiah said in Nehemiah 2:8.

Sometimes, when you’re standing in the middle of the story, you don’t know how God is going to work it out. You simply take the next step of obedience. But when you look back, you can see what you couldn’t see at the time: that the good hand of God was in fact, upon you.

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