A Pivotal Truck Stop

Week of June 24

I’m a salesman and a part time chaplain to the trucking industry. This is a true story.

Shortly after returning to Nashville I went to the chapel at the truck stop in Antioch to pick up some tools that I left there before going to Florida and to talk with Chaplain Doug. A young man came in and started asking the chaplain questions. The nature of the questions told me I should retreat to the chaplain’s quarters and pray for Doug while he talks with the man. I could hear the chaplain making progress when a lady truck driver comes in and interrupts the conversation. I came out and suggest that the lady and I go next door to the restaurant. She is angry with God and unloads on me. We talk for more than an hour and she calms down. I realize I have to leave and I give her my cell number and head back to the chapel to pickup my tools.

The chapel is empty and I wonder how Doug made out with the young man. As I walk out of the chapel with my tools I notice a truck waiting to pull up to the fuel isle but there is no truck in front of it. The driver is just staring straight ahead.

I yell, “hey trucker you can move up.” No response, the driver stares straight ahead.

I walk over and jump up on his rail. “You ok?”

The driver slowly moves his head and says he is waiting for his wife who is in the restaurant. Then he adds, “I’m a mess.”

I tell him to pull around and park and to meet me in the chapel. I drop my tools in my truck and I spot

Doug in the restaurant. He tells me he had a good talk with the young man and has scheduled a follow up tomorrow. Together we go into the chapel and pray for the man in the truck.

After a few minutes, he comes into the chapel. “You have something heavy weighing you down?” He nods. I ask, “are you a Christian?”

“Sorta.”

“Did you ever accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

“Sorta"

“Let’s address sorta. What do you mean by sorta?”

He tells me that he was kicked out of his house when he was 15, moved into the home of a pastor and his wife. He lived in the basement for a few years and that is when he “sorta” heard about the Lord.

.I find a good starting point is getting right with the Lord, would you like to do that,” I ask?

“OK, how do I do that?”

“Go for it! Just start praying.”

There is a long silence. He starts to sweat.

I say, “Tracey there is a battle going on right now over you. If it is alright with you I’ll put my hands on you and I’ll pray over your body. Are you comfortable with this?” He says, “Yeah.”

After two minutes of prayer he opens up and there is a stream of confession, repentance and acceptance of Jesus as his Lord and Savior. We all rejoice. He tells us that the gal waiting in his truck is not his wife but his live in girlfriend.

“I need to get right with that. When she came out of the restaurant with our food she wanted to leave. I told her I had to go to the chapel. She said I’ll wait here.” He looks at me and says, “When I saw you go into the chapel I wondered if you were the chaplain. When I saw you come out I hoped you would come over. When you spoke I couldn’t move my head it was like it was frozen.”

Then he says, “I’m an owner operator. I’ve lost my job, I’m behind in my payments and I’m broke, I had a spot all picked out one and half hours up the road where I was going to drive off and end it all. Then you jumped up on my truck.”

Chuck Sonn
Nashville, Tennessee

It began with a shipwreck

Week of June 17

“It all started when I was shipwrecked off the coast of Africa.” This is how my dad started every bedtime story when my little sister and I were growing up. He always made the stories up according to his mood and while the stories were always different, the beginning was always the same; he was shipwrecked off the coast of Africa. We loved his stories.

He had lived a life full of both hard work and temperance. He was a stonemason, didn't smoke, and he drank only a tiny glass of family home-made wine occasionally. He walked about 5 miles daily to relieve the loneliness and grief after my mom died from cancer. My dad was a spirit filled man who prayed the Rosary daily on his knees.

Dad had been ill for about a year while hospitals misdiagnosed him. Finally we got him to Mass General Hospital where he was diagnosed with stage 4 leukemia. He was bleeding internally and that spiked the stroke that killed him. He was 75 when he passed.

I should tell you that in my family we have MANY instances of contact by guides on the other side so we always expect to get word that our loved ones “arrive safely.” So when my dad died my sister and I expected to hear from him.

A short while after the funeral my sister and I were driving separate cars in two different states (Connecticut and Massachusetts) and we happened to be listening to the same program on Public Radio. Faith Middleton was interviewing an author and asked him to read a page from his newly published book. His first words were, “It all started when I was shipwrecked off the coast of Africa.”

I called my sister that evening and we both knew that it was a message from our story telling dad.

I’ve had one other contact from my dad. There came a time several months after his death when I was overcome with grief and was weeping for him in my bed, calling him in fact, wanting him to be near. At the time, I was lying on my left side in the bed, my head on the pillow. I suddenly heard him call my name, loudly and directly, into my right ear as though he were standing next to me. After I heard my name, my right ear 'pinged' and a ringing sound began in an odd way. Not my left ear, nor did both ears 'ping' -- only the right one into which his voice came. I knew immediately it was my dad and I was at peace.

I hope that these stories I have shared give others as much comfort as I received experiencing them.

Diane Valentine Reading
Middletown, Connecticut

Miracle Healings

Week of June 11

While in San Francisco I was ministering in a multi-ethnic church downtown. There were two deaf mute women who arrived late and I realized that God was going to touch them that day. When I prayed for them they both began speaking and each wept as she heard her own words for the first time.


"I can hear, I can hear!"

One woman was also blind. She had no optic nerve in her right eye. When I prayed for her, she received her sight.

During a previous meeting in Washington State I walked up to a woman and prophesied to her (without knowing her condition) that the Lord was going to heal her hips and knees. She laughed and said, "That's going to be hard, I have steel plates in my knees!" She ended up falling to the floor, laughing hysterically, and remained in that intermittent state for several hours. Five days later I received a phone call from the apostolic/pastoral leader of that region who indicated that the woman was completely healed!



Danny Steyne, apostolic leader, Mountain of Worship, Columbia, South Carolina

Recession House Sales

Week of June 3
We were moving and had to sell our house but little or nothing was selling. We prayed and decided to try and sell our little three-bedroom two-bath home ourselves.


Joy (my wife) had read articles on for sale by owner and together we did everything to make our house presentable. I did some little fix me up projects which I meant to do a long time ago and she made sure the house was clean and tidy. I purchased some house for sale signs and placed an notice in the daily newspaper for an open house Saturday and Sunday.

On Friday evening after sunset I placed a for sale sign on the front lawn. I literally was pounding the stake in the ground when a car slowed in front of the house. The driver, a young woman, asked if I was the owner. I said I am.

She said, “I have been looking for a house in this neighborhood for weeks?”

“Well,” I said, “ You just found one. We are having an open house tomorrow. Come and see our home in the daylight.” She said she would.

The next day three people came to the open house, one middle age couple and the young woman I had talked with the night before. She was single and a lawyer. Joy walked her around the house which smelled of freshly baked cookies (one of the magazine selling tips). She was definitely interested but wanted to return the next day with her parents.

On Sunday she returned with her parents and we all went through the house together. I talked with her dad about the heating system, utility bills and the roof while Joy chatted with her mother about curtains, closet space and kitchen cabinets. It was a good visit and they left saying they would have to talk about it.

On Monday the phone rang non stop. But all the calls were from real estate agents wanting a listing and telling us the pitfalls of trying to sell the house ourselves.

On Tuesday the newspaper called asking if we wanted to renew our ad for the open house, the deadline for the weekend was Wednesday. There was no call from the young attorney.

On Wednesday, I renewed our advertisement for an open house on the weekend. On Thursday we received no calls regarding the house.

On Friday we received a call from the young woman who asked if she could come over. We met with her that evening and she made a verbal offer. We talked a little more and I made a counter offer and she accepted it and we made out and signed the appropriate Real Estate forms( which by the way are available from your local pharmacy.)

The following Monday more calls came from the real estate agents offering their services. When we told them the house was under contract they were shocked. We had sold our house in one week for 97% of the asking price.

What they didn’t know was that we had prayed throughout the whole process and made God our real estate agent.

Fast forward 20 years. It is now the height of the current recession. It was time to sell our cottage on a lake in Massachusetts. This time we hired a human real estate agent but still made God our spiritual real estate agent and we covered the entire process in prayer. It was the middle of the summer and prices were depressed and that weren't many buyers out there.

Our agent set the price higher than I thought it would sell. "We can always come down," she said. We had an open house and within one week we had three offers. One of which became our buyer at 97% of our asking  price. PTL.


 Mal Salter
West Hartford Ct.
Sturbridge Ma.