Thursday, August 29, 2019

Tent Revival Report and More Tent Stuff

We are in the midst of a wonderful tent revival this week at Full Gospel Mission in Evansville, Indiana with Pastor John Eaton and the great folks here. Of course, you never have revival without opposition, but God is prevailing and giving us revival. 

We are having great participation from the community so far and we are thrilled with that. The church lot is on a main route through this part of town and there are many dozens if not hundreds of houses surrounding the church in every direction. There are people walking by 24 hours a day and we are pleased that some of them are stopping for church under the tent.

The blue dot is where the tent is in the picture below. Look at that neighborhood!


I have been working on a few things the last three tent revivals to help us watch the tent. When we are in a city, we usually need to watch the tent 24 hours a day. We also have to have time to do everything else that needs to be done and we like to sleep too.

First, I purchased three motion sensors that ring an alarm inside the bus when someone walks in front of them. While we were in revival at Anchor near home, I built stands for them one afternoon from 2x4s. Here they are gathered near the trailer before church.



I spread them around the tent when we are not in service. They are not 100% reliable, but they do give me some peace of mind.

I have also purchased two Wyze Cams and I have a third one coming. At the moment I have one hanging on the center pole and one mounted on the Bible Stand. This is the picture that I see on my phone or iPad.







This is the night view.




I have them set to alert my phone if there is motion under the tent. These are much more reliable than the motion sensors alone. With constant activity on the streets here, there is no way I could leave the tent unattended at night and get any rest at all. With the cameras, I am doing better.

I lay on the couch with the passenger windshield uncovered. I can glance out the window and see the tent at any time. I have both cameras pulled up on my iPad and it is a few inches from my pillow. If someone walks near the tent or under the tent, my phone alerts me and I can easily see on the iPad and through the window if I need to go outside.

I am resting some better than normal. The only major glitch is internet connectivity. We only have cellular internet and it is not always reliable for the cameras. I have had to reset everything a couple of times in the middle of the night and that kind of works against the whole purpose.

I think the motion sensors and the cameras are helping though.

The cameras also have the capability of shooting timelapse videos. I had the tent pole camera take a picture every minute from 5:00 PM to 9:30 PM on Tuesday night. The video result is 9 seconds and I think it is pretty neat.

I hope it will play here. In the past, videos I posted here would not play on Apple products. Google and Apple do not play nice together sometimes. Let me know if you can not see it and let me know what kind of device you are reading the blog on.



I filmed another timelapse on Wednesday night with pictures 35 seconds apart, but it is a bigger file and I could not get it to email.

Another project that I completed the week we were in revival at Anchor was building a foldable altar. When I purchased my first tent from Kenny Searcy in 2000, he had made two foldable altars. He was not ready to sell them then, but later, Bro. Joseph Hunt ended up with them.

Bro. Joseph brought them to Amber, Oklahoma the last two years for us to use. This year, Kelly Jo took a video of them. I studied the video and made my own. My altar needs some tweaks, but it is working fine and it is easy to transport. I stand it up against the trailer wall and strap it tight.



We have two more nights of tent revival in Evansville and then we tear it all down, drive to Pine Prairie, Louisiana and do it all again. Please come be with us if you can. I believe we are going to have two more awesome services.

Thank you for reading today.

Davy