Bristow Holiness Camp In Pictures

It was so nice to be back at Bristow Holiness Campmeeting again! We have attended Bristow a lot through the years and we have always enjoyed it. We were there every year when we were pastoring in Wichita and as evangelists we had settled into a routine of being there at least every other year and often times multiple years in a row.

Our tent revival itinerary has convoluted our schedule and we had missed three years in a row. It was definitely time to reverse the trend and we are glad to be back! We are believers in the real need for the holiness people to have campmeetings and we want to support them with our presence.

A lot of things have happened in the last few years at Bristow. The actual campground that hosted Bristow every year, going back into the 1950's was torn down and the campmeeting was left without a location. They had rented the location all those years and it had served them very well. Now they were faced with a tough decision.

The board met and decided to pursue finding and purchasing property near Bristow and building a new camp. One week later the new property fell into their hands in a miraculous way and they were in the real estate office signing the papers!

After several more miracles, this is the result and it is beautiful!

The Tabernacle as viewed from the fellowship hall.

The fellowship hall

Another view of tabernacle

The RV spots are in this picture down on the right.

Inside the 100x120 tabernacle

The tabernacle is up. The kitchen is up and closed in. The bathrooms are completed. About 20 RV parking spaces are in with FULL hookups and ALL 50 amp spots. There is water and sewer bored under the turnpike and hooked into Bristow city services. (This was a major miracle in itself.) There is also lots of packed gravel parking and beautiful concrete sidewalks.

AND as of now, they have no debt!

No wonder Bro. Aaron Brock, the chairman of the Bristow board, is ready to praise the Lord!

The kitchen and fellowship hall needs to be completed and they have hopes of adding more RV spaces and a smaller tabernacle for children's church as the money is available. It is absolutely amazing to see what God has done!

It has been a wonderful week of preaching, singing, worshiping and fellowship and we are so glad we came. I hope you enjoy the pictures from Bristow Campmeeting.

Davy

They served meals and concessions after church in the fellowship hall of the Bristow Holiness Church a few miles away.

Thanks to Joy Martin for helping Odie get a lot of our friend's pictures.

We parked at Kellyville Holiness Church a few miles away from Bristow. We really appreciate Pastor Jonathan Brock for allowing us to do so. It is a super wonderful place to park the BoggsMobile.

City Reach Tulsa and OKC Locations

We have had folks asking about the location for City Reach Tulsa and City Reach Oklahoma City. It is easier to put the information here than it is to send it out repeatedly by text and email.

City Reach Tulsa will be held in Fred Johnson City Park at the corner of E. 61st St. and S. Riverside Dr. As you can see in the picture below the park is just south of I-44.

This is the satellite view and the pin is in the approximate position of the tent. The paved area above the pin is the parking area and is accessed from S. Madison Ave. The best GPS address is 6000 S. Madison Ave.

City Reach Tulsa is scheduled for June 12-19, Sunday through Sunday. The Sunday services will begin at 6:00 and Monday-Saturday will begin at 7:30. We plan to set up the tent on Saturday June 11 at 8:00 AM.

The location for City Reach OKC is just north of SW 59th St and S. We will be set up northeast of the corner. May Ave. 5730 S. May Ave will get you there using the GPS.

We are planning to put up the tent in the grassy area where the pin is and the parking will be in the grass south of the parking lot.

City Reach OKC is scheduled for June 26-July 1, Sunday through Friday. The Sunday services will begin at 6:00 and Monday-Friday will begin at 7:30. We plan to set up the tent on Saturday June 25 at 10:00 AM.

We would love to have you join us in these meetings. We are believing that God will continue to save, heal and deliver as He has been in the previous City Reach campaigns. Thank you very much for praying for City Reach. We know the real work of City Reach is spiritual and your prayers equip us to carry it on. May God bless you for it.

Thanks for tuning in today.

Davy

The Roadside Attraction

We have attended both nights of Bristow Campmeeting so far and both have been tremendous. Odie is taking a few pictures along the way and we will try to post them later in the week.

The Roadside Attraction

We hit the ground running when we arrived in Texas a couple of weeks ago and there has been no shortage on things to write about here each day. In the midst of all the activity, I forgot to post about something we stopped to see on our way from California to Texas. The BoggsMobile stopped at one of the most famous oddball roadside attractions in the world.

The route we took, I-40 to Oklahoma City and then I-35 south to Texas, is not lacking great things to see or places to stop along the way. There are lots of sights to see within an hour or two of that route. There is Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, The Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Navajo Reservation, beautiful Albuquerque, The Big Texan and the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial just to name a few.

We have stopped at all of these places and would have loved to stop at all or some of them on the way through, with the exception of Vegas. Once was enough for Vegas. We were constrained by time on this trip so we had to bypass all of those stops and many more.

We did take time to stop one place we have never stopped at before. We have passed it many, many times and often say, "The next time we come through here during the day we are going to stop and see that, just to say we did." This time we did.

This oddball roadside attraction has been around since 1974. It was high time we took a few minutes to stop and pay a visit to the Cadillac Ranch.

It is actually not a ranch but a piece of art with several Cadillacs from 1949-1963 half buried nose first in the ground. It was bad cold, windy and muddy but we parked next to the road and walked over to the Cadillac Ranch on the south side of I-40 on the west side of Amarillo.  

It was not a good day for pictures and there were people every where but here is the picture to prove we were there!

As you can probably see, folks are constantly spray painting all over the cars. The graffiti is kind of encouraged. That means the look of the cars is constantly changing. There were people painting on all 10 cars when we were there. The bad thing is that they throw the cans every where and it looks like a dump. I really wanted my grabber and a super sized dumpster!

Also the cars were buried pretty much intact but many of the parts and even body panels have been stolen. I guess it is all part of the charm.

Odie stayed in the bus to avoid the mud, plus the gate is not wheel chair accessible. Not only would the chair have been muddy but she would have had to stand in the mud and work her way through the gate. It was not worth it to her, so she viewed it from the bus door.

This is a view of the bus from the Cadillacs. It is a lot farther out there than it looks from the road.

Now you can see the bus.

Soon we were back on the road with the pedal to the metal going east. Now the we have been to the Cadillac Ranch, we can cross that off our to do list.

Thanks for reading.

Davy

Life Has A Few Negatives Too

Last week started with a short drive from Victory Tabernacle to Prevost Ft. Worth last Monday. Before we left I captured a picture of this little creature.

Kelly Jo quickly became his friend but he was not very enamored with us.

This is where we were parked all though City Reach Ft. Worth.

35-40 minutes after we left, we pulled into Prevost. The shop was not open for business that Monday but they were expecting us to go in and get parked. That is exactly what we did.

I write a whole lot here about great services, folks getting saved, people being healed, good friends, great food and a whole lot more good stuff that happens in our lives. We are tremendously blessed and we are very thankful.

But we are normal people with normal problems and normal bad days. Nothing in this life can be positive all the time. Our life may seem out of balance to those of you that read regularly because I write so much about blessings, smiles and good times. I am not exaggerating one ounce when I tell you how good God is to us on a day to day basis. 

It may be that I am doing you a disservice by not showing you the other side of the coin. However, it is difficult to write about the negatives because it is easy to come across as complaining. I honestly have nothing to complain about at all.

This is simply the full report. When the BoggsMobile is needing repair, that can be very stressful for me. I usually do not feel positive in times like that. I am not depressed, I am not about to quit, I am not discouraged with God, but shop days are nerve-wracking days for me. 

Hey, knowing you are spending several thousand dollars in a day and a half is enough to make any one anxious. For you it may be a leaking roof, a sagging porch, a busted water heater or a central air unit going out in July. For me, it is a bus! That is life, right?

They got us in early Tuesday morning. Soon the BoggsMobile was up in the air again.

We were there to take care of the anomaly in the air system that we experienced on our first day of travel from California to Texas. The consensus from the experts was that one or more of four relay valves was going bad. Two of them have been replaced so I was having the other two replaced. It is possible the problem was just a fluke but Jeff Rowe considered it more of a warning sign. If one of those valves goes kaput, then the bus is dead in the water. That is not good!

While they had the bus in the air, they noticed both tag wheel seals were leaking. Those are Must Fix items because dry wheel bearings will lock up, start a fire and burn a bus to the ground. It happens with alarming regularity so it is something to watch carefully.

I also noticed one of the chains on the tag axle was hanging down. This little "thingamahoochie" was broken. They replaced that as well.

They also replaced the brake pads on the tags too.

It ended up being a 15+ hour job with all three shifts working on the bus by the time they were finished.

I knew my tag tires would need to be replaced this year and in January I realized the four drive tires would need to be replaced as well. I was really hoping to make it until next year but Tuesday I came face to face with reality. The tags were on the front for three years and then on the tag for two years. They were in really bad, bad shape.

Michelin tires are the best choice for these buses and they are very expensive. I belong to a program with great discounts on Michelin tires and I am glad I do. I called Michelin and got a recommendation on where to get them. It was the same place Prevost told me about.

I have purchased tires from TCI in other locations across the country. 

I called the one in Lancaster and they had the Michelins in stock with recent date codes and they had time to get me in the shop. I first thought I would be there Tuesday afternoon but since we were at Prevost until 11:00 PM, I changed the appointment to Wednesday morning.

I knew I was in the right place when James said to me, "Tell me how you want this done. How do you want us to jack it and if we are doing it wrong, don't be afraid to tell us."

All six tires have the date code of 1116. That is the 11th week of 2016. That is pretty recent.

The reason the date is important to me is that for RV tires, age is very important. Most folks will never wear the tread out on a motor home tire but if the tires are too old, they will come apart in a catastrophic way. I learned that lesson the hard way on our first fifth wheel on a very cold December day in 1992. Ouch!

Age on my car tires are not that important because in 2-3 years they will be wore out from miles driven. If the "new" bus tires have been sitting in a wharehouse for 2 years then their actual life on the bus is shortened. 

They moved the front tires to the tag and all the rest are now new.

It was about a two hour process but it was pleasant and the work was completed properly. The office had some problems with the paperwork but we finally left there about 12:30. We barely made it north of Dallas and I pulled over, done for the day!

Thursday we finished the trip to Tulsa and Kelly Jo and I went to work on finalizing the permitting process for City Reach Tulsa. We have been working on this literally for months but a few hours of smiling and talking and talking and smiling finally lit a fire under the right person and we had the permit by Friday mid morning.

Oh, but I get ahead of myself. Thursday evening we went to Los Cabos for a wonderful Mexican food fix and Odie snapped some pictures. Wow it was good!

We parked in Broken Arrow at South Mission's new location. They are remodeling the building and are not having church there yet. It was a great place to park.

That brings you up to date. We have positive and we have negative and that makes for a happy and blessed life. God is good all the time, even in our minor adversities!

Thanks for reading.

Davy