Kansas was great, Oklahoma wasn’t OK

Landon is doing the second leg of the Bible Road Trip; this is his third post from the road (read previous Road Trip posts).

What a wonderful end to the week we had in Kansas as we stopped in Shawnee for a night with Mill Creek Community Church and many users around the Kansas City region. A man and his children even drove all the way from Lincoln, NE to be with us!

The next night we had a wonderful time with Pastor Ross Strader and the warm folks at Calvary Bible Church in Wichita. It will be hard for anyone to beat the reception we got from these guys and gals with all the work they put in to make this one of our best events yet. Everything was going so great. I should have seen the looming storm clouds on the flat, prairie horizon.

The next day we stopped for gas and lunch at a little truck stop just inside the Oklahoma border (can you believe people still pay less than $3 for a gallon of gas!) and while we were stopped, I pushed the bedroom slide out about a half-a-foot so I could slightly open a drawer to pull out some shorts to wear instead.

Now, you’d think there’d be a warning display or an observant passer-by who would have notified me that I began driving down the road toward Tulsa (our Friday night event) with my bedroom sticking out, but the first announcement I had was the glass breaking in the back room as we pulled off from a toll-booth where I had, to my horror, caught the slide on the toll-booth roof accidentally remodeling the RV and causing a total mess on our bed.

After the cops came, we barely made our stop that night in Tulsa, pulling in just in time to get the laptop plugged in and to tell the story to the small, stunned crowd there who laughed when I joked about having to ask for a love offering to pay for the inevitable deductible (and possibly job-hunting expenses!).

Thankfully, Bob and Dale were just as understanding as I hoped (and prayed) they would be encouraging me in my efforts to repair the RV along our route in the coming days. The holiday weekend was full of nauseating grimaces, phone calls, repair shops, story-telling (it’s actually given us MORE opportunities to tell people about this Road Trip and Logos Bible Software!), glass cleanup (sometimes with a spoon) and boarding up as we began the process of fixing the glaring hole in the side of the RV.

So, as we head out to Texas in the coming days, pray with us for no rain, streamlined insurance and repair tactics and the internal reminders that cause us to slow down and take a second look at everything around us, and most importantly, that we realize everything is going to work out fine.

We are mindful that the Lord uses all things for His glory and that, as James tells us, we should be joyful in tribulation as the Lord uses it to refine us into servants more steadfast and mature.
(James 1:2-4).

And that’s the whole reason we are out here – for His glory trying to help people become better servants of our Lord.

See more photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bibleroadtrip