Inspirational Prayer on I-70

By Ron Lantz, Ludlow, Kentucky

As appeared in

Traffic on I-70 wasn't too bad. I should have been enjoying myself that day last October, sitting up in the cab of my 18-wheeler, cruising through the Pennsylvania hills.

Thirty-six years as a trucker, and I still got a kick out of my rig. Bass Transportation bought this 600-horsepower tractor in 2000. I was the only one who drove it, and although I'd logged almost 400,000 miles, the cab was still so clean you could eat off the floor. If traffic held steady, I would make my usual run right on schedule, hauling a tanker of building compound from Ohio to Delaware, then deadheading back to my home in Ludlow, Kentucky.

But I didn't make the run on time that day, for the same reason I wasn't enjoying the trip. The Beltway sniper. The words hammered in my head. Eight dead and two wounded already and it didn't look like there'd be an end to it. At any truck stop in the D.C. area, all we talked about was the white van the police were looking for. Schools were closed, people too scared to leave their homes. It weighed on me that this guy was out there getting ready to kill again. I knew what it was like to lose someone you love. Five years earlier my wife, Ruth, and I had lost our only son, Ron, to multiple sclerosis.

It was a pretty October day just like this one when he died. I knew when I got to the nursing home that something was up because there was a lot of hollering down the hall. "What's going on?" I asked.

"It's your son, Mr. Lantz," a nurse said.

I hurried to Ron's room. There was our boy sitting on the edge of his bed, hands raised over his head, praising the Lord. For more than a year he hadn't been able to sit up on his own.

"I'm leaving here," Ron said. "Someone's coming through that door tonight to take me home." Then he looked at me real hard. "Dad, I don't want to be up in heaven waiting for you and you don't make it."

It wasn't the first time he'd brought up the subject. Ron was a real committed Christian. My parents raised me in the faith, but somehow I'd drifted away. "I want you to go over to my church right now," Ron went on. "Find my pastor and give your life to the Lord."

Well, that's exactly what I did. Afterward I went back to the nursing home and told Ron. I'm glad I had the chance, because somebody did come for my boy that night to take him home.

My life turned around. I got active in church. I headed the men's fellowship, led retreats, was on the Sunday school board. I'd never start a run without kneeling by my bed at the rear of the cab and asking God to watch over Ruth.

After the sniper shot his first victims, I'd been praying about that too—that someone would stop this killing spree. It had gone on for 12 days already. Around 7:00 p.m., when I was about an hour and a half out of Wilmington, Delaware, the usual report came on the radio. Nothing new on the sniper. All they knew was that a white van might be involved.

I got to thinking about what I'd learned at church, how a bunch of people praying together can be more powerful than a person praying alone. What if I get on my CB, see if a few drivers want to pull off the road with me and pray about this?

I pressed the button on my microphone and said that if anyone wanted to pray about the sniper, he could meet me in half an hour at the eastbound 66-mile-marker rest area. A trucker answered right away. Then another and another. They'd be there. I hadn't gone five miles before a line of trucks formed, some coming up from behind, others up ahead slowing down to join us. The line stretched for miles.