Back in February, we ran a story about SonCoast Publishing, a new company started by Martine Bates Fairbanks, longtime book reviewer for TAB, and several other Alabama Baptists.
Terry Long, associational missions director for Choctaw Baptist Association, read the story, and then he clipped it out and kept it.
“I said, ‘If I ever publish my book, I want them to do it,’” he said.
His book was something he’d resisted writing for a long time — the story of the time back in 2012 when he’d put up a cross on a busy roadside in Mississippi and just simply did one thing: prayed. The response was so overwhelming that he stayed 100 days.
“I saw Book-of-Acts type conversions,” Long said.
When word got around that a guy was praying for people at the cross, people pulled off the road all day long to ask for prayer, he said.
He would pray for them, write down their prayer requests and have them nail them to the cross, and then he would ask them if they knew Jesus.
More than 1,500 prayers
In that 100-day period, more than 1,500 people came to the cross to share their prayer requests, and around 30 put their faith in Christ for the first time.
The book, which finally got written this year, holds the stories of many of those people and is called “100 Days at the Cross.”
Sharing stories
Long has seen the idea replicated since. As he’s told those stories over the years, other churches have wanted to try it.
In December 2018, TAB shared the story of another church — Tallawampa Baptist Church, Toxey — who put up a cross and offered prayer with the help of volunteers from Calvary Baptist, Butler, and Lusk Baptist, Gilbertown.
Others have done it too.
Now that the story of those first 100 days are in book form, Long is seeing God move in new ways.
People have reached out to him to purchase copies to give to friends, and one man, after reading it, asked if he could start meeting with Long for Bible study.
“Every single story is a moving story,” Long said.
“It’s not about me — it’s about the cross. The cross is the message.”
The book is available at Amazon.com or by contacting Long at 205-245-4286 or tlong@alsbom.org.
Share with others: