Pictures From Home And The Road

Wow! We have a whole bunch of home and road pictures for you today. Looking at all of these wonderful pictures makes me realize that they are actually just a drop in the bucket of the pictures we could post from the last several wonderfully busy days.

I understand that a lot of you come here every day for the pictures. Yes, KJo, I am looking at you. But that is OK. We love giving you pictures! Get ready for picture overload today!

I will present them to you with some running commentary along the way.

First, look at these temperatures. This was Ohio on Christmas Day.

15 and feels like ZERO

Any way you slice it, that is too cold for humans to live, at least this human.😅

A beautiful sunny moment among mostly cloudy days.

The Green Machine is still beautiful in the right light and especially in darkness.😍

Dryden Rd. Pentecostal Church

It was great to see Bro. Jimmie Radcliffe recently!

Jo Jo and Charlie are in the house!

KJo and her Dad making music on guitars. This put a big smile on my face even long after the music stopped.

When KJo's Dad stood up, the zipper on his coat caught in the guitar string. They could not see how in the world it stuck or how in the world it would come off. It was so funny to watch AND take pictures.

After a few minutes, the zipper and string were loosed as quickly as they became tangled. What in the world?

Hooking up to the tent trailer in order to move it into position as we prepared to leave.

Time to go south.

Most of the day was cloudy and misty, but the sun broke through!

We have new readers joining all the time, so some of you may not be familiar with the beautiful people in the picture above and the picture below. This is Bro Herman and Sis. Margaret Woods from Kingston, Tennessee. Kelly Jo and I met them 7 days after we married in 1985.

We love them like family and they have taken us in as family for all of these years. Herman and Margaret have been an incredible influence in our lives in more ways than I can describe to you right now. They are like second parents to both of us and another set of grandparents to Odie. They are so precious to us!

Years ago, when I was a Pastor, Bro. Herman would invite us to preach revival each year. Several times during the revival week he would impress on me his opinion that God had equipped our family to be evangelists. 

He would say something like, "I am not saying you are not in the will of God as a Pastor right now, but remember, son, God is going to use you as an evangelist. Mark my word, you are not always going to be a Pastor."

Right there, in the moment, I could not see that at all. But Bro. Herman was right. He could somehow see the bigger picture that God had outlined for us. Bro. Herman did not make me an evangelist. He did not have the power or even the desire to do that. But he perceived what God was doing. Praise God for men of vision and faith.

Bro. Gary Thomas is from Colorado Springs and we see him and his family in Vonore, Tennessee! What a special treat!

That wraps up a boat load of pictures for you. We are long gone from Tennessee, but we should have you caught up to real time by Monday. Thank you for stopping by today.

Davy

A Big Blue Ox

Let us talk about a Big Blue Ox today.

We often receive questions about how we arrive for revival with both the bus And car. When they notice we have a car to drive, they sometimes assume Kelly Jo drives the car and I drive the bus.

I am so thankful that is not the case. I would not want to travel very many miles without KJo in the bus with me. We like being together and we have great contentment riding down the road and looking out the windshield together.

How do we get there with both the bus and the car and only one driver? Well, you see, the car pushes the bus everywhere we go.😊

Not really. The car is attached to the back of the bus by a tow bar and it rolls behind the bus with all four wheels on the ground. That is why it takes a specially equipped car for us and another of many reasons why we do not like to trade cars frequently.

When we first bought the BoggsMobile, we had no vehicle that could easily be pulled behind us. From late March to September 2008, we pulled nothing. The first month or so KJo followed behind me in our Chevy truck that we had driven for over four years. Once we got the truck in Ohio and up for sale, we had no car to drive during revivals. While we were traveling between revivals, we would try to get groceries and do laundry since we would usually have no way to go during the week.

That fall, Bro. Rickey Searcy sold us Mr. Cheap Jeep. Kelly Jo drove it to our first revival after that, but that week I ordered a baseplate and had it installed, along with the wiring for lights and we towed it away from that revival.

That is when I began my education about tow bars, base plates, towing lights and more.

I purchased our first tow bar used, very used. It was a solid tow bar, but it was old and had one major flaw. The tow bar had no way to fasten up off the ground once it was unhooked from the Jeep. I had to remove the pin, remove the tow bar from the bus and find a place to stow it all week. It was heavy and a big pain.

A few months later Bro. Brent Gabbard gave me a nearly new Blue Ox tow bar that he was not using. Blue Ox is one of a few major brands that make products like this in the USA. 

I have used that tow bar for probably 12 years. After 4+ years we traveled by the Blue Ox factory in 2013 in Nebraska and had it rebuilt. It was so worn that they hesitated to rebuild it. They even replaced parts that they do not normally replace.

That was 7 ½ years ago and it has been in pretty pitiful shape again for a year or two. These are well built, but they take a lot of abuse in their normal service. With the miles we travel, I have definitely used this tow bar beyond its expected life span. 

I started trying to order one months ago, but like everything is in this COVID world, it was hard to get one. I found one in stock that could arrive in Ohio by the end of December so I ordered it.

Not surprisingly there was a delay and we changed the shipping address for it to meet us in Tennessee at East Tennessee Luxury Coach the first week of January. It arrived and I installed it right away. 

It came with new safety chains and a new electrical cord was added later in the week.

This new Blue Ox is a work of art. It really looks nice. It also has several improvements over the old model. The old one could get in a bind if the bus and car were not perfectly straight and nearly level ground. This one is mucho improved in that area.

Even though I keep the tow bar covered when we are parked, it is used lots of miles in all kinds of weather and will be caked with road grime before you know it.

I am thankful we were finally able to find one in stock at a great price and get it in. The website where I bought this now has it listed for $100 more than I paid, which is more in line with other places. I appreciate finding a good deal.

Maybe that answers some questions. Thank you for coming by to sit a spell with us today.

Davy

A Word For Wednesday (1)

Today is the first in what is hopefully a series I am calling A Word For Wednesday. Some weeks it may be a sermon, a sermon excerpt a sermon illustration or anything else considered "preachy". I am a preacher after all.😊

These posts may be written text within the post or in video format. Today's A Word For Wednesday post is a video I recorded a few weeks ago. At nearly 29 minutes in length, it is a touch longer than I intend these to be, but it is still a learning process for me.

Please extend a little grace to me and check this out. I am reading an old sermon and loving every second of it. This particular sermon brought me under conviction and I wanted to be generous and share.

It is from The Keswick Week 1965. The sermons is called "Two Complimentary Characteristics of Sin" by K. F. W. Prior. Give it a few minutes to grow on you and share if you like it.

Please let me know IF you like this and would be interested in more videos like it. IF you Never want to hear anything like this again, feel free to gently let me know that too.😁

Thank you for stopping in, friend. Do not be a stranger, come back soon.

Davy

A Day In Boggs Family History - January 5, 2003

Here is a big Mile Marker for you today. 18 Years!

18 years ago this morning was our last service as a Pastor. I had announced my resignation previously and Sunday Morning, January 5, 2003 was our last scheduled service. It was bittersweet. We loved the people God had allowed us to serve and we hated to leave them. Yet, we knew that God had asked us to trust Him and we were excited to see what He had planned for the church and us.
 
I preached my heart to them that morning, hugged and cried and snotted until I thought my heart would burst. That afternoon, it was time to move on.
 
Moving on was one thing, but where were we going? We honestly did not know exactly what we were doing long term. I had four revivals scheduled during 2003 and they were scattered throughout the year as a Pastor would need to preach them. The first one was in late January.
 
A friend asked me to help with his church while he was taking care of some medical issues, but that would only last 3-5 weeks in the spring. So we had 8-10 weeks accounted for out of the next 52. Well, no time like the present to take a leap into nothing, right?
 
Except, we were not taking a leap into nothing. We were not taking a leap into the dark. We were taking a leap into the hand of God and that is the safest place in the world to be! I knew that God had spoken to me to resign as Pastor. Even though I did not know the "why", I understood the direction clearly.
 
I honestly suspected that I would be going into another pastorate. I did not know where, I did not know when, but I assumed it would open up and within a couple of months we would be settling in for the long haul serving a congregation somewhere.
 
I did not know that God had been preparing us and equipping us for evangelism for a long, long time. I had no idea. KJo and I did not realize that we could live with so much joy on the road. There were so many things that we did not enjoy about evangelism in the early 90s. We did not know it could be so much different.
 
But different it was. Sunday and Monday night, January 5-6, 2003, we drove to Oklahoma City to kick off a revival for Pastor Rickey Searcy at Mt. Vernon. His evangelist had been delayed and Bro. Rickey asked us to fill on those two nights. That was kind of normal. I preached for Bro. Rickey a lot and we enjoyed it.
 
Monday night we drove back to Wichita, finished liquidating and storing stuff and Wednesday we hooked onto our 1984 Hitchhiker fifth wheel and pulled about three hours to Weir, Kansas. 

We backed into the parking spot and immediately sheared a pin in the front jacking system of the fifth wheel. There was no time to fix it, it was time to get ready for church.

Even with trailer problems on my mind, God clearly guided us those two weeks in Weir, Kansas with Pastor James Fellers. It was incredible for us. I have written about it here before, but while singing “He’s An On Time God” one night, we all knew we were right in the middle of the will of God. This is it! This is what God is guiding us to do. This is the will of God for us at this time.

We stayed two weeks in Kansas, then two weeks in Tennessee, another week in Kansas, three weeks in Gainesville, Texas, a week in Arizona, two weeks in Alabama, four or five weeks in Florida, a week in Kansas, two weeks in Alabama and on and on like that all year long.

By the end of 2003 we had preached every night we wanted to and pulled that 19 year old trailer nearly 40,000 miles. I eventually purchased stainless machine screws by the pound and screwed the metal siding of the trailer to the structure in different places nearly every week. We literally lost a whole pane of glass from a trailer window somewhere along the road in March. The glass did not break in place, it seriously fell out!

We ran from coast to coast singing and preaching anywhere we were asked. We made two quick trips to California that year, one in the truck, one by plane. We sprinted here and there, worried at any moment the ride would be over.

Along the way, we found our way.

We found our footing and slipped into our place in God’s divine plan. God opened doors for us to minister to people we did not know existed, go places we never dream of going and experience joy in ministry that we could not comprehend.

18 years later, we are still going. What? Where did the time go? How did we get from January 5, 2003 to January 5, 2021 so quickly? Even with all the memorable events of the last 18 years, it seems we arrived here in the blink of an eye.

Yet, here we are. We know we are in 2021. We feel the miles. We feel the years. We feel the emotions that 18 years of road life and evangelism produce.

We have given the strongest and most productive years of our lives to evangelism. I was 35 when I left Wichita, I am 53 this morning. I would love to believe my prime years are ahead of me, but the reality is they are probably behind me or at least partially behind me.

May God grant us many more years to give, but if they are all given, we do not regret one ounce of it. God has given to us in such measure that we have not been able to contain it all. He has given us such wonderful relationships, fabulous friendships, great joy in ministry, much happiness in each other, abundant contentment with our life and provided beautifully for our temporal needs.

His gifts to us are immeasurably more than we could give to Him in a thousand lives. What a wonderful privilege to belong to the family and God! To have a place of small usefulness in His family is a bonus to be treasured.

We have so much to be thankful for. Thank you to Pastors and churches that have opened your churches to our family and your hearts to our ministry. You do not have to extend invitations to us. You do not have to receive us. We appreciate your kindness. Thank you for it.

Thank you to those of you that pray for us. Thank you to those that read Mile Markers, go to church with us online or encourage us in a thousand different ways. We receive notes and letters and emails and texts with kind words that regularly reduced us to puddles of tears. 

We really do wonder why you think so highly of us. We know who we are. We know where we came from. We know or suspect, how low and rotten we would be without God's grace.

It is God that saved us, God that lifted us, God that called us and God that sent us. You receive us and you encourage us. Thank you. Thank you very much.

We have enjoyed all of that for 18 years. Sometimes I think it is time that we retired out to pasture (pastor) somewhere and spend our final years of ministry pouring ourselves into one church. Sometimes...

But most of the time I wonder what is around the next bend in the road, what is just over the next hill and what is going to happen in the next revival? That pulls me out of my daydreams, into the bus and onto the road.

I think I will run on a little farther and see what the end will be.

Thank you for joining us.

Davy

A Look Back AND A Look Forward

We are On The Road Again.

It Begins

Our very first scheduled service of 2021, yesterday January 3, was canceled due to COVID cases in the church. It is unavoidable and completely understandable and not even frustrating anymore. It is part of our current manner of life and we are thankful for God's grace and help. 

I did think it was worth mentioning here since I know that many of you are following along closely and praying for us and the churches.

Thank you for reading Mile Markers each day. I appreciate the great response to our first post of the year last Friday. I want to expand on that a bit.

I know that some of you read Mile Markers every night when you receive notice by email and some of you read every morning. Others read occasionally and we want you to know that we appreciate all of you.

We are not breaking any records in our little corner of the internet, but we are amazed at how many folks read Mile Markers each day. Blogger tells me that we had 272,000 page views in 2020. Thank you for being part of that number.

Our most read post of the year according to the numbers from Blogger was March 21, 2020. That was the day we arrived home for quarantine and two days before we began 61 nights of online revival. It was called We Need Revival In Uncertain Times.

I have reread that post today and our need for revival is as great on January 4, 2021, as it was in March 2020. There is nothing, No Thing, that will pull us through this mess besides God. We need God to move among us and saturate us with His love, His presence, His power and His peace!

We spent the next 61 nights after that post, trying to be an instrument of revival. We are still praising God for the way He helped us every step of the way and is still helping us today. Many of you joined us those nights of revival and we appreciate the encouragement you have given us in response.

YouTube

To begin the online revival, we needed a presence on YouTube. I knew nothing about videoing for YouTube and less than nothing about getting it from my phone to YouTube itself. There is nothing to motivate learning like "It must be done in two days!"

Our YouTube channel is insignificant in the grand scheme of YouTube, but we are very happy with the modest growth. We have 1056 subscribers and our revival videos and other videos have been watched 68,500 times for a total of over 12,000 hours. We have posted about 150 videos with most of them being live.

We are very thankful that many of you readers have also walked along with us on YouTube. It has been quite an incredible journey for us and we hope to keep rolling by God's grace.

What is the plan going forward? Well, we plan to keep right on posting here nearly every day and we hope to continue posting as much as possible on YouTube this year too. In fact, our first YouTube post of the year will be this Wednesday as we announced the last Wednesday of 2020.

There is a way you can help us grow Mile Markers and our YouTube Channel and that is by following by email here and by subscribing on YouTube and sharing posts you like whenever you can, wherever you can. We appreciate it very much.

Brother and Sister let us look forward and let us go forward by faith into 2021. Seek God’s face, hold God’s hand and trust God’s heart. He will lead us safely home. 

We appreciate you stopping by Mile Markers today too. Thank you and may God bless you.

Davy

View Out The Front Window 1/3/2021

I told you last week that our view would be changing soon and it has. This is our view out the front window in beautiful Vonore, Tennessee.

Sunday Morning Sanity

I suspect that many fans of the wrath of God Underestimate God's mercy and Overestimate their own righteousness. (Josh Rowley)

May God bless you all with a super great Sunday. Thank you for stopping by Mile Markers.

Davy

Flip The Switch

Hey Friends,

This is Odie checking in with you. I hope that you are doing well today! Thank you for spending a few moments of your day with me! I am thrilled to be visiting with you virtually.

I have been home, enjoying my home, for most of December. When I am here it is easy to look around and admire all the little touches that make this house my home.

For this post, I wanted to focus on a small feature in my house. This has become one of my favorite things that we did to make this house fit my needs.  

Dad and Papaw Eugene handled the bulk of the electrical while we were building. Our cousin Gary Coffman and his crew helped us do a few things too. I appreciate Gary being on speed dial to answer our questions. He knew all the stuff that our county required for electrical and that was a huge help!

When we were discussing and planning to build the house I had an idea and I asked Dad if he could make it possible. He is awesome! Dad made my idea a reality for me. I absolutely love it! In fact, he was already planning to do it, I just did not know it.

What makes me so happy? It is a bank of light switches above my bed. I can control the majority of the lights inside AND outside my house from my bed! It is even better than I wanted it to be. I just asked for controls for the bedroom and bathroom lights, but I received so much more.



Have you ever climbed into bed and snuggled in only to discover you left a light on? Yeah? Me too! It is so hard to make yourself get out from under the covers and out of bed in order to turn the light off. For me, that can be a multi-minute process. 

By the time I drag myself out of bed, get in my wheelchair, go to the light switch and then reverse the process, I have spent way too much time. There has to be a better way and having all the switches above my bed is perfect!

My switches are within arm's reach. I definitely use my switch bank daily! I actually can control the bedroom light at three points in the room. I think it is amazing! I can also control the bathroom light, the living room light and all of the outside lights.

There is another switch in the bank of switches that usually gets flipped multiple times a night. That switch controls my ceiling fan. If it feels stuffy or I need air moving during the night I will turn on the fan. Then after a while, I start feeling chilly. It can be a never-ending cycle, but there is a handy switch to control things.

Who knew how important switch placement can be for somebody with limited mobility? I am so thankful for every small detail that helps me. My special light switches are wonderful. I am so grateful that Dad made this feature possible for me!

The large and small details of my home make it perfect for me! I thank God every day for the marvelous blessing of a home. He is so good to me! God does not owe me this. There are so many millions of people that have nowhere warm and safe to live. I am very thankful for my blessings.

Thanks for reading. I will close for now. I hope you have a great weekend and a great beginning to 2021.

Odie

Thinking About The New Year And What It Brings

Well, it is the very first day of 2021 and here we go! 

Will the new year be better than the year it replaces? No one knows that for sure, but one thing I can guarantee about 2021. It will be different! Every year brings new challenges and new life circumstances, but every year also brings new blessings.

God's Word says, "... as thy days, so shall thy strength be." As each day comes, there will strength for that day. We are not promised strength for tomorrow, but when tomorrow becomes today, God will provide the strength that you and I need for today!

He will also provide the direction we need WHEN we need it. Sometimes I want to see clearly many days, weeks or months in front of me. 

However, God did not promise He would light up my path so I could see way down the road. He did say His Word would be a lamp for my feet and a light for my path. The Psalmist said, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." That is like a flashlight one step at a time.

I may not see next June or next December clearly at all, but IF I will follow the light God gives me for the next step and the next step and the next step, then I will be exactly where He intends for me to be in six months and 12 months from now!

All of this requires trust. We must trust that God knows better than we do, sees more than we do and will work it all out much better than we ever could! God is trustworthy, friend. He is faithful and true!

Does that mean everything will be easy?

Does that mean everything will go according to our plan?

No and No. There is no easy way through this life and there is no foolproof plan. No one knows enough to plan things perfectly and no one gets an "easy" pass in life.

If you and I learned anything from 2020, we should have learned that we really know very little about how to handle the present and absolutely nothing about what is coming in the future. Hopefully, we have learned to make our plans loosely and always say, "If it is the Lord's will" or "By God's grace."

I am preaching to myself right here, my brothers and sisters and I am preaching good and right.😍

I love knowing what to expect. I do not like surprises in life. But I have been forcefully reminded in 2020, that my plans are best in God's hands! I am doing my best to buckle my seatbelt, roll with the punches and go with the flow.

We have already had our first changes to the 2021 schedule and we are just getting started. A Pastor text me this week and told me that COVID had made an appearance in their church. 

Thankfully, I was able to move another January revival into the week he was scheduled and shuffle his church a week later to give them extra time to get through the outbreak. Whew! That was close!😊

It really helps that almost everyone understands the complexity of all this stuff and they are willing to do whatever is necessary. I imagine the only completely inflexible people would be those that have not had to deal with this yet. Unfortunately, they will become more flexible eventually.

KJo and I seriously considered staying near home for a few months. We desire to stay safe ourselves and we certainly for not want to be an instrument that spreads the pandemic. We have never felt it was in our calling to spread the flu or anything else!

But this is what we are called and equipped to do. As we decided last summer, we feel obligated to try to be catalysts for revival the best way we can while doing it in the safest way possible.

There will be bumps in the road. There will be hiccups, delays, detours and cancelations. We are determined to go forward and deal with all the bangs and bruises as they come, the best that we can at the time.

If God has other plans, He is completely and totally welcome to lead the way, nudge us into a different lane or take the wheel out of our hands. He is God, He is God alone and He is God all by Himself without my help. AND I like it that way.

We appreciate you praying for us daily. Thank you. Please make sure you check and double check our schedule before driving any distance to be in service with us. I will do my best to keep it up to date.

Thank you for reading today too.

Davy

A Few Personal Christmas Pictures

More and more of our friends are suffering from the effects of COVID and they need God to help them. I am sure that you have a list of people you are praying for as well. Let us join together in asking God for miracles in so many lives. 

Some are suffering at home. Some are in the hospital. Some are in ICU and some are on a ventilator. We must have God's help!

A Few Personal Christmas Pictures

Do you have room for a few more Christmas pictures? We have a few more to share.

It is our tradition to have our little family Christmas in the BoggsMobile on Christmas morning. Odie came down and climbed on the bus for our family celebration. It was so nice of her to join us.

The day after Christmas Odie cooked a great meal for us and we went up and had Christmas with her in the house. I am loving this new tradition in our family. Thank you, Odie!

We loved every moment of these two family events and we have a few pictures to prove it. I hope you enjoy the pictures. Thank you for stopping by.

Davy