5 Rock Ranch

So while our family was in Oregon this summer. I was a chaplain for the Boy Scouts...in case you didn't know. Cessie met a young lady who, in hearing our story about the ministry plans we have, said we had to meet a couple who where like parents to her. They just opened this ranch, through some amazing God circumstances and we just had to go a see them and share our hearts for fatherhood together. So she set it all up for us to visit the ranch during our off time one weekend.

Well getting there was going to be a challenge. You see, we had no car, and the little town of Tillamook, Oregon had only one car rental shop. The prices where good locally but you could only travel 150 miles total before they started to charge $0.35 per mile overage. So I ran a scenario of traveling to Seattle where we have family and we discovered it would cost $735 in mileage not including gas! We had low hopes of pulling this little getaway off; well, I plotted the course to McMinnville, Oregon and it was only 68 miles away, and the ranch was officially 73 miles from door to door. We took that as a God sign, since we could only travel 75 miles each way.

So I show up at the car rental place to sign everything, estimating around $125 cost to get to the ranch and back, but apparently as long as we took the car after 4pm and got it back by 8am we would not be charged for 2days. So we left on Friday and returned on Sunday only paid for 1 day of car rental and total cost with gas for the weekend was less than $75.

The Bradleys where so hospitable that they let us stay in one of their AMAZING cottages free of charge, in real beds...yeah we had been sleeping in a pop-up camper for 4 weeks at that point. They took care of all our meals, lodging, and got to do a little square-dancin' in the evening. The FOOD...don't get me started. I was reunited with an old friend, THE BLUEBERRY, I had never had naturally sweet blueberries before...shakes and IHOP don't count. We had cowboy burgers and fries and even an sundae party on a Saturday night even.

The most amazing part of the trip was just hearing the story of how 5 Rock came to be and the God moments they had experienced in stepping out on faith to affect a fatherless generation. We were truly inspired by their work, and the heart of the staffers to serve others. God has got his hand on that place.

Video Coming Soon