During the 1990’s, my wife and I were involved with a ministry we called Appalachian Mountain Mission. Our goal was to show God’s love by taking food, clothing, toys, and furniture to some of the most economically ravaged areas in the Appalachian Mountains. During the time we worked on this ministry, we saw God move in some amazing ways. The following are stories of some of the most memorable experiences during this period of our lives.
On our first trip, we quickly realized that we needed a truck to carry donations into western Virginia. Fortunately, a local automobile dealership offered rental trucks. These were large trucks with a box on the back that was eighteen feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall. On the sides of the truck in bold letters, was the message “Rent this truck.”
I spoke with the rental manager about using the truck. Everything went fine up until the point that I said, “We don’t have any money. We want you to give us the truck for free.” The rental manager looked at me strangely. He might have even grinned a little. Then he said, “That’s not something that I can approve. Only the owner of the dealership can authorize what you want to do.”
So I asked if I could speak with the owner, and they allowed me to go back to his office. When I told him what we were planning on doing, he asked where we went to church. I told him that we attended a local Foursquare church that was on the outskirts of town. His immediate question was, “Is that a real church?” I assured him that we were a regular church and I told him the name of our pastor.
After we talked through his church concerns, he said, ”Well, who do you know that I know?”
This was a much more difficult question because, although we had lived in the area for a while, I worked in a different town and we knew very few people outside of our local church community. I had, however, been involved in a project that had allowed me to meet several of our county commissioners. So I told him that the greatest probability was that he would know one of the two county commissioners that I knew, but I also emphasized that they don’t know me well and we had just worked together on this project.
His response was, “Well, let me think about it. Call me back in three days.”
Three days later, I called the dealership. The owner said I could pick up the keys on the date I had requested. As an aside — after we had made several trips to the mountains, this same owner chided me one time when he found out that we had made a trip without using one of his trucks. He firmly told me that anytime we wanted to make a trip in the future, I should contact him first. If one of his trucks was available, it would be ours for as long as we needed it.
As we approached the date for the trip, we were still well below having enough donations to fill the truck. However, on the Monday before we were planning on making the trip, we found out about a local church that had a thrift shop that had lost their lease. They needed to quickly dispose of the entire contents of their shop and they had been praying and asking for somebody to come and take everything at once. When we contacted the church, they said, “Bring your truck, we’ll load it with everything that we can.” By the time we left the thrift shop, the truck was so full that we had trouble pulling the door down.
Since our first trip was such a success, we immediately started planning another one. The first trip had taken place a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and we decided that a week or so before Christmas would be a good time to go again.
For the second trip, we felt that we needed something larger than our basement as a collection point and storage location. We heard about a local church member who owned a small strip shopping mall with one store that was vacant. We reached out to him, explained what we were doing and asked if he would donate the use of the store. He said that he would be glad to let us use it for the months of November and December, however there was a stipulation that we had to have things cleaned out by the end of December. We agreed and our collection point was established.
Our local newspaper found out about what we were doing and asked if we were available to do a human interest story. A reporter came out the next day and we talked for about an hour describing what we were doing, what we had seen and what our plans were going forward.
Several weeks passed and nothing appeared in our local newspaper. Finally, on Monday afternoon of the week when we planned on leaving for West Virginia, the article about our missions project was printed in the afternoon newspaper. Almost immediately, a local TV station contacted us and wanted to do an interview for the Monday evening news.
During the next 36 hours we saw an outpouring of generosity and love unlike anything that I’ve ever experienced before in my life. We went from having 50 to 100 boxes worth of goods stored in the back of the store to having donations stacked from floor to almost ceiling for at least the front twenty feet of the store, with just a small passageway from the front door to the back area where we were boxing goods.
One young couple stood out during this time. They came by our store around 6:00 PM that Monday and asked how long we would be at the store that evening. We told them we would be there at least until 9:00 PM. “Great” they said and asked that we not leave until they got back. Shortly after 8:00 PM, the couple returned. They had gone to a big box toy store about thirty miles away and had bought a car load of new toys to donate for the children!
At this time we still didn’t have a truck, and the sheer volume of what had been donated would not fit in even two of the trucks that we had used in the past. The owner of the store stopped by to see how we were doing and started panicking! He reminded us that we had agreed that the store would be vacated by the end of December, and added, “You need help.” He suggested that we contact Burlington Transportation, a major logistics firm that was based in our town, “Because” he said, “they help people like you.“ Afterward, he told me that he went to church with the man who was the President of Burlington Transportation and proceeded to give me his name and phone number, suggesting that I call him and see what they might be able to do to help us.
By now, it was 9:00 on Wednesday morning and we were scheduled to arrive in West Virginia on Friday morning. I called Burlington Transportation and asked to speak with the President. I ended up speaking with his secretary since he was in a breakfast meeting with his senior managers. I told the secretary what we were doing and what we needed. She graciously said she would convey the message to the President when he got out of his meeting. About 10:30 that morning, I got a call from the President asking me for more information about what we were doing. After we talked for a while, he said that they would be glad to help us out. He asked me where our collection point was located and when someone could meet his driver there because they were going to bring a large trailer for us to load our goods into.
I gave him the pertinent information and immediately left my work to help with getting the truck located. When I got there, I was met by the local Terminal Manager and the Vice President for Safety. They had brought a 45 foot trailer that they were spotting just outside the door of our store so that it would be easy for us to load the truck.
I told them how thankful we were for what they were doing and offered to provide lodging for their driver since our plans were to go up on Thursday evening and start distribution early Friday morning. Their reply was, “Don’t worry about that. Just tell us when the trailer is ready, where you want it delivered and when you want it there. We’ll take care of the rest.”
With that, we started loading the trailer. We later found out that the donations weighed almost 17,000 pounds.
We traveled to West Virginia on Thursday evening as planned. When we went to get breakfast at the motel on Friday morning, we were greeted by the truck driver who was sitting there drinking coffee. We had an opportunity to talk with him while we were waiting for the team to eat breakfast and get ready to go to the church that we were using as a distribution point. As we talked with the driver, we found out that he attended a local Baptist Church and had seen the article in Monday’s newspaper. He shared how he had wept when he read what we were doing and that he told his wife that he wished that there was something that he could do to help with the effort. He then told us how he cried again Thursday evening when he found out that he would be driving the truck for us.
During the day, as we were unloading the truck and setting up the distribution point, a group of people began gathering. Soon, a line had formed that stretched for blocks waiting to go through the donations.
As we were finishing unloading the truck, we got a call from a local bakery. They had heard the story on a local radio station about what we were doing and they offered to bring all of their day-old bread over to let distribute while we were giving out the goods that we brought. We jumped at the opportunity.
In North Carolina we had also collected over $1,000 from people that wanted to just donate money to the effort. We spoke with the pastor about using this money to bless people with food and about buying it from a local store so that local businesses could benefit as well.
One of the men who was helping with unloading the truck said he had a pickup truck and knew the manager of a local grocery store. After a couple of quick phone calls, we jumped in the pickup truck and headed out. The manager said he would sell us cases of canned foods for his wholesale cost. We quickly loaded the pickup truck. As we were getting ready to pull out, the manager told us to wait a minute. He said that they always give green stamps to their customers. Since we didn’t need the green stamps, he said that he wanted to give us two large bales of paper bags so that we could package the food as we gave it out.
When we got it back to the church, we were directed to a garage to handle the food distribution. We unloaded the pickup truck and sorted the food by categories of canned meat, canned vegetables, bread, etc. Afterwards, we started praying and asking the Lord how to package the food to give people the maximum possible?
We felt like the Lord gave us directions on how to pack the bags. We started packing bags and just handing them to people in the line that had formed when word got out that we had food to give away. God’s provision and His direction was amazing. We were able to pack full bags all the way to the last bag. And we handed the last bag of food to the last person in line!
On one of our next trips, we felt like we needed to contact a local rental truck agency for a slightly larger truck. We were working with several churches by then who were helping to collect, sort and package goods. We went to a major truck rental agency and they said that they would let us have a truck with a 24 foot long box. However, since they were giving us the truck instead of renting it to us, we would have to provide our own insurance coverage.
I started calling local insurance companies and it was fairly easy to find somebody that would write us a policy for liability. But, we couldn’t find anybody that would write us a policy to cover any damage to the truck itself. This was somewhat concerning and we prayed a lot about what to do about that.
Finally, with the trip date approaching, I was driving down one of the main streets in our town. Suddenly, I felt a presence in the car with me. When I looked over at what I thought was the empty passenger seat, I saw an angel sitting there — or at least part of an angel. The angel that was so large that his feet stuck out through the front of my car, beyond the front bumper and his head and shoulders stuck out above the roof of my car. I realized that I didn’t need to worry about not being able to get collision insurance, and that I had the best insurance possible policy possible. I was riding with an angel!
Finally, when the day came, I picked up the rental truck and we started the loading process. For people that are familiar with large box trucks, you know that on the rear part of the frame, there is a large rubber bumper or cushion that’s on top of the rear axle so that if a heavily loaded truck hits a bump, the bottom of the the cargo area of the trunk will hit the rubber bumper instead of damaging the axle. When we got ready to pull out from the final church, I noticed that the box of the truck was actually sitting on these rubber bumpers. We were overloaded!
I also knew that there were several weigh stations between us and where we were going. If we were to get stopped at any one of these weigh stations for being overweight, we would not be able to continue our trip until we did something to deal with the excess. As we prayed, we felt like the Lord said go ahead.
When I pulled out on the interstate heading out of town, I was overwhelmed. For the first 10 miles of the trip, I was just weeping because of the presence of God in the cab of the truck.
When we came to the first weigh station, it was closed and I was just relieved that God made a way for us.
But the second weigh station wasn’t closed. I knew that if God didn’t intervene, we were going to be stopped for being overweight. When the truckI got on the scales, they gave me the green light and cleared me to go on. I’m convinced that My angel was standing behind the truck, lifting the rear end so that it wasn’t overweight.
When we got to our destination and distributed our load, everything was just wonderful. We had a great trip. However, on Sunday morning, when we were scheduled to leave to come back home, we awoke to find that it had snowed overnight and there were several inches of fresh snow on the ground.
I had to have the rental truck back Sunday evening. I also had to be at work early on Monday morning because I had an important meeting scheduled. Waiting to leave until the roads were cleared was not an option. So we pulled out with the truck and we were the only vehicle on the road for the next half hour or so.
Finally, we came to where we had to cross a mountain to get from the valley that we were in to the four lane highway on the other side. We had to cross using a two lane road that was carved into the side of the mountain. It was like a stone wall on one side of the road and a sheer drop-off that at times looked like it descended hundreds of feet on the other side. There were no tracks in the snow. No one had travelled on this road since the snow had started falling the night before.
The road was a constant uphill climb for about seven miles. I knew that once I started climbing that mountain, I had to keep going because if I ever stopped I probably would not be able to regain traction and would have to back down the mountain. And backing a 24 foot long truck down a curvy three or four mile grade was not something that I wanted to do.
About halfway up the mountain, we came to a place where the road took a sharp turn to the left around an outcropping of rock. As I described before, there was just a sheer drop-off on the right that ended in tree tops below. As we entered the turn, we came face to face with a snow plow attached to the front of a large dump truck.
I remember vividly looking at this large plow. Next, I looked at the rear wheels of the dump truck to see that the driver had hit the brakes and the wheels on the truck were locked— the dump truck was sliding down the mountain! Finally, I locked eyes with the truck driver. They looked like they were as large as saucers! He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. The only explanation that I can offer for how we were able to pass each other on that narrow road, in the middle of the turn, is that the angel assigned to us for that trip was working overtime. We successfully climbed the mountain and the remainder of the return trip was thankfully uneventful.