Through their 60-plus years of writing for Guideposts, John and Elizabeth Sherrill have encountered some incredibly inspiring stories, and shared them with us.
Now as they look back on their amazing journey of life and faith, the Sherrills are revisiting some of their favorites—survival stories, real life love stories, angel sightings and more—so that we can be inspired by them all over again.
It sounded like a perfect story for Guideposts! The infamous “Beltway Sniper” had been caught with the help of a truck driver named Ron Lantz from Ludlow, Kentucky.
What made it seem especially right for us was a single sentence in the newspaper account: “Ron Lantz, a Christian, said that the prayers of dozens of long haul truckers played a pivotal role in the Sniper’s capture.”
My wife and I should drive out to Ludlow and talk to him, we decided. Except…every magazine and media outlet in the country, it turned out, wanted this story. One TV network even had a helicopter tracking his rig. Apparently the man had been so harassed that friends, neighbors and co-workers had set up a buffer to keep reporters at bay.
I ran into this firewall with everything I tried. I called every Lantz in the Cincinnati area—Ludlow is just across the Ohio River—and they either really didn’t know him or claimed not to. Grasping at straws, I called truckers’ associations, local newspapers, real estate agents, banks, city police and county sheriffs, Better Business Bureaus.
Churches should have been my best lead; since Lantz was a praying man and a Christian, he probably was a member of some local congregation. But there were literally hundreds of churches in the greater Cincinnati area. Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Assemblies of God—I called dozens every day for a week. Most of the people answering the church phones knew the name Guideposts, so I felt they were telling the truth when they said they didn’t know Ron Lantz.
It was sometime in the second week of living on the telephone that I called the Central Church of the Nazarene in Fort Wright, Kentucky. “Guideposts!” secretary Phyllis Graves said. “It’s my favorite magazine! Uh…can we get back in touch with you?”
My wife and I spent two days with Ron and on Sunday spoke about Guideposts to this lively and welcoming congregation in Fort Wright. And the story? It was even more right for us than we guessed, beginning with a son’s dying wish…
Read the story John Sherrill helped Ron Lantz write.
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