FORT WORTH, Texas (BP)–At a Wyoming truck stop, Louisiana trucker Charles Worcester was 1,600 miles from home when crisis struck: He had emergency colon cancer surgery. After nearly dying of complications from the surgery, he was transferred to Salt Lake City. Such was the long-distance, three-month ordeal for Worcester and, back in Louisiana, his wife Charlene.
It could have been very lonely for Charles and worrisome for Charlene had it not been for Christians in Wyoming and Utah who ministered to the Worcesters. And such help for the Worcesters –- and about 200 other distressed truckers and their families per year — may not have occurred without Bob Hataway, a chaplain for the North American Mission Board who heads up TransAlive, a nationwide ministry that aids truck drivers and their families when truckers become ill or seriously injured on the job.
Hataway and his wife Carol also meet needs and share Christ while traversing the country on TransAlive’s AmCoach, a bus equipped to transport ailing and recovering truckers back to their homes. Assisting about 20 drivers annually, AmCoach is an alternative to expensive medical transports for ailing truckers and, as Hataway put it, “a cup of cold water in their time of thirst.”
“On the coach itself, three have come to Christ,” Hataway said. “We’ve shared with many on the coach who have said that it was the first time they’ve seen Christianity with a new understanding,” causing them to become “less critical.”
Hataway’s call to minister to distressed truckers came in 1975 when he stopped at a traffic accident and later checked on a hospitalized trucker from Indianapolis. Bob and Carol subsequently ministered to the driver and his wife for more than eight weeks.
That incident imparted a concern to Hataway, a member of First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, about the plight of truckers who often are isolated from their support systems.
“I was moved by what had been done for that [Indianapolis] truck driver. Many people became involved with that man,” prompting Hataway “to visualize the needs of drivers” across the country.
Nine years later, in 1984, Hataway founded TransAlive, burdened that people often don’t help distressed truckers because “they’re not aware of the problem in the first place. Setting up a plan to notify the right people became my goal in the industry.”
Through partnerships with major trucking companies, Hataway is among the first notified when a trucker experiences serious illness, injury or death while on the job.
“We need only to hear that a driver and/or their family members are in distress anywhere in the continental United States, and we move quickly to remove the uncertainty and replace it with warm caring friends willing to assist whatever the task,” Hataway said.
The 44,000-plus Southern Baptist churches nationwide are Hataway’s first resource to find help. Using the church search function on www.sbc.net, Hataway immediately seeks a Southern Baptist minister to be what he calls “God’s representative” to that trucker or his family.
That’s one reason Hataway is a keen advocate of churches having accurate emergency contact information on their answering machines and websites. Yet, he said, many churches don’t.
Because one church had such information, Hataway was able to contact and ask Doug Riggs, pastor of Woodland Heights Baptist Church in Bedford, Texas, to make a local death notification of a trucker who had died of natural causes on the job.
Riggs went to the trucker’s family and stayed until their pastor came. “They were very gracious, kind and appreciative,” Riggs recounted. “It was news they didn’t want to hear, but it was handled through Bob in a way we would want it to be handled.”
JB Hunt Trucking Company has called on Hataway since 1987 and is one of several companies supporting TransAlive financially. Hunt employs about 16,000 drivers, many of whom are owner/operators.
Mark Whitehead, Hunt’s vice president of claims and litigation management, said, “What we use Bob for more than anything else is to notify families of catastrophic injuries or occasionally the death of a family member.”
Whitehead said Hataway “has a network of pastoral people that can be called on who will make the notification to the family and wait with them until they have the support they need in the initial crisis. We feel it’s better for Bob to do the contact rather than a police officer who will go and then leave.”
Charlene Worcester is grateful, too, saying the ride back to Louisiana “could not have been more comfortable for Charles. I cannot say too much about the AmCoach or the Hataways in what they did in helping us get home,” she recounted. They were truly a Godsend for us.”
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Kay Adkins is a freelance writer based in Mountain View, Ark. For more info on TransAlive, go to www.transalive.com. To make sure your church contact information is correct or to add emergency contact information, click on the church search option at www.sbc.net.
