“Impossible! You’ll never get a loan to buy a house.” No provable job history, no current employment, no guaranteed income—in other words, no basis for anyone lending us money. My wife and I had been homeowners for twenty years and had a work history of eleven years in industry followed by thirteen years in ministry. But our move in 1995 from Canada to the US to help launch a church plant left us with no earthly hope for our family of four, including two teenagers. Time and again, from one mortgage broker to the next, our prospects looked dim. How had a young boy like me—who visited yearly the idyllic farm of his grandparents and dreamt of pitching in the big leagues and making a success of himself—ended up in such a challenging situation?

This is a story about God’s leading and His faithfulness, not mine. My wife and I dared to believe, “The Lord’s will, will not lack the Lord’s supply.” This belief was severely tested when we set out on an audacious step of faith. Previously, we had owned four different homes, so we were not new to seeking mortgages both in the US and in Canada. As we were finishing paying off our mortgage on the last house, the Lord began to burden us with a vision to plant an independent church with a team of six other people in Rochester, New York. It would mean moving our family from one country to another and all that entails. We had no financial backing, no monetary commitment from any source, no mission or church planting organization backing us. But we had a bunch of people praying for us. It was crazy to even think about the enormity of what we were doing. But, after much counseling with “godly grey hairs” (those older Christians whom we highly respected), we became convinced the Lord was leading us to make the move and trust that He would provide the finances.

We don’t have space here to give all the back story, but the miracle of a car crash was God’s provision of a home for us. We took a huge loss in our home equity due to the US/Canada exchange rate at that time (about a forty percent loss), plus the disparity in housing prices was disconcerting. Initially, we lived in a borrowed condo owned by a couple on the plant team who went to live with another family in the area. Our kids started high school and we began to plant the church, but we had no home of our own.

Mortgage broker after mortgage broker told us the same story: they couldn’t give us a mortgage loan because we had no guaranteed employment income. Our tax filings had always been as “self-employed,” but we did not have any self-employment income in the US (at least not in the previous thirteen years). Our Canadian income history and impeccable mortgage payment record were irrelevant to the US brokers. It would be nuts for anyone to lend us money under these conditions. The last broker told us he personally felt for us in our predicament, but his hands were tied. It would be impossible for us to get a mortgage anywhere, he said.

After a few months of spending down our cash on hand (our home in Canada was tied up in a lengthy closing situation), groceries offered to us from two Christian food banks helped us, along with a few small gifts from supportive believers. Things were tight financially, but we continued daring to believe God would supply, without us asking for financial support. We were on a mission for the kingdom of God. He would supply what we needed. We were putting our faith on the line; could we continue, or would I take a “regular” job to earn some money, which would mean taking away precious time for church planting? To be sure, many, in faith, engage in bi-vocational ministry, and we would be willing to do that, but we didn’t feel that was God’s plan for us.

About three months had passed when I got a call from my son, who was seventeen years old at the time. He had just been rear-ended driving our car on a major interstate highway that ran through Rochester. This was in 1995, before cell phones were ubiquitous and only the well-off or businessmen had them. The driver of the vehicle gave Jason his cell phone to call me. After apprising me of what happened, he handed the phone back to the other driver so we could exchange insurance information. Almost immediately we recognized each other; he was the last mortgage broker to reject our application for a loan! In a flash, he said, “Chuck, don’t worry about this accident; I’ll do good about it.” I assumed he meant he would take responsibility for the accident.

Now, the greater Rochester area at that time boasted a population of around nine hundred thousand people; what was the likelihood that of all those people, the one who ran into my son was the last broker to reject me? In following up on the incident, my auto insurance rep, still with a Canadian company, informed me that the other driver told his insurance company that he got rear-ended by the car behind him, which pushed him into my son. Long and the short of it, neither company would pay for our damage. He apparently wasn’t going to “do good about it” for us after all! Or so we thought. Imagine my surprise less than a week later when we got a notice from his office that we had been approved for a mortgage loan!

I can surmise human reasons why he was eager to give us a loan after a car crash like that; he didn’t want his insurance rates to go up or get “points” added to his driving record. Who knows his reasoning? From a human perspective, the odds were one in almost a million that he would be the one to run into our car. However, we didn’t see things just from such a limited perspective. This was clearly a “God thing;” He had provided a loan for us, and within two months we moved into our “new-to-us” home in Rochester, which became home to the new church plant for the first year.

This is just one story of how God has proved Himself as the supplier of all our needs. Many times we doubted how the Lord would provide, but He has always been faithful! And for the boy who spent two weeks every year at his grandparents’ farm in northern Minnesota, dreaming about his future—little did he know God had bigger plans than to play baseball in the big leagues!