By Grace Thornton
The Alabama Baptist
Rick Hagans has walked across 37 states. He has stories from all of them.
The family in Louisiana who fed him a hamburger while they shot roaches off the wall with a BB gun. The drunk man he found on the side of the road in Alaska and brought back to Alabama with him to help him start a new life.
And the countless other people he’s shared the hope of Christ with — like the pastor in New Hampshire who was on his way to commit suicide.
“My son was with me on that trip and we had finished our walk for the day and were trying to hitchhike back to our vehicle,” he said. “A man came by and asked if we were OK and we told him where we were trying to go.”
The man said it was out of his way but he would take them. Hagan and his son got in the truck and the man gave them a basket of blueberries he had picked that day.
“I told him I didn’t have anything to offer him in return but that I was a preacher and I asked him if I could pray for him,” Hagans said. “He started sobbing and said he was a preacher too but that everything had been going really badly at his church and he was on his way to kill himself when he saw us.”
Both men knew it was a divine appointment, Hagans said.
“God goes to great lengths to reach people in their moment of need,” he said.
That’s why he doesn’t mind the weeks he spends walking the roads of each state asking God if He’s got anyone for him to talk to that day.
“People often ask me why I do it,” he said, “and I always ask them, ‘How far would you go to reach one person?’”
In his mind the answer is as many miles as it takes.
Hagans, founder of Harvest Evangelism in Opelika, started his treks more than two decades ago when he decided to walk west to east across Alabama. His goal was to collect 10 pairs of shoes for each mile he walked and give them to those in need. The next year he walked the state north to south.
He’s been walking every year since. On Labor Day he will began walking his 38th state — California — from north to south down the coastal highway. It will be a journey of about 1,000 miles — his longest walk to date.
“In the past, I’ve walked 20 to 30 miles a day but the older I get the more of a ‘labor’ it is,” Hagans joked. “I’ve got pains in my knees these days so I will probably do more like 15 to 20 miles a day this time.”
If he can finish what he started he may be the first man to ever walk across each of the 50 states, he said.
“A book publisher told me they had researched it and can’t find anyone else who’s done it.”
Talking to God
What does he do during those long days of walking? Hagans said he prays for friends and family, communes with God and asks Him to give Him divine appointments along the way. Sometimes people start walking with him. Other times when he hitchhikes back to his van at the end of the day he gets to share the gospel with the driver.
Friends and family sometimes join him too — his wife, Kim, will be walking California with him this year. And sometimes churches invite him in to speak and some of the members will come out and walk with him the next day.
Occasionally they will invite him to stay the night.
Most nights he puts poster board up in the windows of his van and sleeps in the back. But just in case he can’t get back there at the end of the day he carries a tarp for a tent in his backpack.
What else does he carry? Band-Aids, potted meat, a Bible, a journal and a bottle of Yoo-hoo — “all the necessities of life,” Hagans said.
Over the 10,000 miles he’s walked, he’s figured out what works for him and he’s never once been nervous about being harmed along the way.
That even includes the night he accepted a ride from two witches who offered him a room at their coven for the night.
“There were 15 to 20 self-professed witches there. The next morning was Sunday and I asked them if I could hold a church service,” Hagans said.
Surprisingly they said yes, he said — and three of them accepted Christ and left the coven that day.
“Jesus said, ‘Go into all the world,’ and that means everybody,” Hagans said. “Through these walks I like to challenge people to step out for Christ. It’s amazing what can happen when you do. We can’t do everything, but we can all do something.”
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