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Vision Logo Circle

A God Given Vision: The Fifth Wheel Worship Centre

by | Fri, Sep 28 2018

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truck

Here is what can happen when a mature truck-loving couple collide on an online dating website. First the collision, then the smash repairs, followed by some panel-beating then a paint job in that order, before drivers, Tony and Mina Gunter, parked their rigs, settled on the same number plate, jumped in the cab, to drive away together and live happily ever after. End of story? No! Instead it was just the start of a God ordained relationship coupled up with a God-given vision.

 

The Proverbs 31 woman and Lone Ranger girlfriend

Tony is from Brisbane, Mina is from South Carolina, and both have the vision for ministering to truck drivers in the USA. But first, we reverse the pick up back to where the Tony and Mina’s story parked awhile when their relationship was just moving in first gear on a single-lane road into an  uncharted pot-holed territory.

Initially Tony’s visual of the road up ahead was limited to a steep descent followed by a roadblock.

“I’d put in my profile that if you’re going to tell me you’re a Proverbs 31 girl, you’d better tell me you’re a Song of Solomon’s girl because Proverbs 31 leaves out a lot of stuff about marriage.”

Tony interprets Proverbs 31 as a list of potentiality in three areas of a woman’s life.

It just so happened that at the time of writing, Mina had a clear view of the road ahead according to her GPS. After all she just happened to be teaching a class on Proverbs 31! “She sent me a message that basically said I didn’t know what I was talking about in a polite southern way.” (Mina is a southern belle and Tony is a true blue, dinky di Aussie.) “I wrote back and said, ‘Thanks for writing. You’re entitled to your wrong opinion, have a nice life.”

“Then she wrote back in that polite southern way again and told me I was egotistical, and I wrote back and said, you’ve misunderstood. You’ve misinterpreted ego for confidence.”

“I know who I am, where I’m going and what I believe. You’ve missed my life statement of worth once trickled down a cross and touched the ground.”

Although it was a rough start, Mina was in for the long haul and wrote back to Tony asking him if they could keep emailing. That got Tony thinking. “And I thought what for, I haven’t got a persecution complex?”

Mina had been captivated by Tony’s statement about his worth which referred to the blood of Christ trickling down a cross and touching the ground. She reflects how “that’s when I fell in love with him. Right then. And I knew that God had called this man to be in my life and vice versa.”

Tony had met his match and began to realise that Mina was just as much a straight-shooter as he was. “If there was something that he said that I didn’t agree with, I always made sure I let him know what my opinion was and he did the same,” Mina said. “I think that’s so important because you just can’t be somebody’s yes man because that’s not even true life.”

“We laid our cards on the table. There was nothing we didn’t talk about,” was how Tony described it.

Tony reflects how Mina told him she loved him, but for him, he wanted to walk into this relationship slowly.

“And that’s the way it was!” Mina stated. Tony goes back to his profile, his declaration of independence you might say and reads what’s written in his terms and conditions.

Almost a year went by with the two talking to one another before Tony decided to head to the States to meet Mina. “We’d decided to meet in a place where we had mutual friends. I had a place to stay and he had a place to stay and we could meet. I knew it was going to work out but he hadn’t figured it out yet,” Mina said.

“I went over in October 2003 and we married 12 days later.” As Mina explained the pair had been talking to each other and both their families. So Tony and Mina were married by a pastor in Nashville, Tennessee with whom Tony had built a relationship with on previous visits to America.

Another big ticket item for Mina’s credentials in the wife-for-Tony stakes was not only her love for Jesus, but a close second may have been her love for pick-up trucks.

Nowadays the pair are an international family with four children between them and a grandchildren tally of five.

 

God’s vision to build a  truck-stop chapel

In 1990 some months after Tony Gunter had left the police force in Western Australia, God had given Tony a vision that involved a US truck drivers’ ministry. Tony was studying God’s word on motivation of the heart that included a reference to the Book of Chronicles where David was passing on to Solomon the plans for the temple. He remembers reading this verse …

 

About Tony and Mina Gunter

It should be mentioned that Tony Gunter is a bush-poet whose poems go back to the 70s,  that have lead many hundreds of people to Christ.
Mina spoke of one of Tony’s poems that has taken on a life of its own. It’s become a national icon and a legacy of Tony’s love for his home country–Australia
“To the Sunburnt Ear’ is a tribute to the Australian soldier. That’s the one that’s played across the country on ANZAC Day.”
“Then there’s the ‘Thankyou’ that comes before the poem. That brought Tony together with the president of the Currumbin RSL who’d been playing the poem for years before meeting Tony.”

Listen To Tony Gunter’s Anzac poem – ‘To the sunburnt ear’