This older wording was folded into the complete canonical item below.
What a Book!!
IllustrationStory★★★★A Christian salesman who was crossing the desert one day stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. The eager young hiker quickly opened the door as if to step in, but seeing an open Bible on the seat by the salesman, a strange expression came over his face.
He hesitated a moment and then slammed the door, saying, “Forget it. Go on. I don’t want a ride!” Puzzled, the salesman drove on.
Some time later he was helping with a service at a prison in California when an inmate came up to the bars and asks to speak with him. The inmate asked the salesman if he had been driving across the desert on a certain day. Yes, he had. “Weren’t you stopped by a hitchhiker who started to get in and then changed his mind and told you to drive on?”
“Indeed I was,” replied the salesman. “Well, I’m that man,” the prisoner admitted.
“I had planned to kill whoever stopped for me, take their money and car, and head out of the country. But when I saw your Bible, I remembered my mother and her Bible.
She was always reading it, when she wasn’t praying for me. It all came back to me like a flash. I knew right then I couldn’t take your life— not with that Bible there beside you.
That’s why I told you to drive on.” Later he did find someone else and carried out his plan. “They caught me, and that’s why I’m here,” he explained.
The point
A hitchhiker who intended to rob and kill his driver reconsidered when he saw an open Bible on the seat and remembered his praying mother, though he later carried out the crime elsewhere and was caught.