You know that rental car prices are out of control when it is cheaper by far to get an uber to the few places you want to go that you cannot walk to than it is to rent a car for longer than one has to. When one is staying in the airport and fairgrounds area of Tulsa, there are limited areas where one can and wants to explore by foot. The part of Tulsa where I happen to be right now as I write this reminds me of some of the sketchier parts of Tampa and Portland. Do you like seeing police pulling people over, the sound of sirens blaring frequently, the sight of vagrancy, streets not being maintained, buildings with rusty corrugated metal roofs, and the like. These are the sights one sees in Tulsa whether one is on foot or in a vehicle. It is a shame to see cities that are just not maintaining what they have, even as they try occasionally to build a new building or two somewhere.

It was striking in particular to see that while Tulsa itself was falling apart that when one moved to the west side that things were going considerably better in the Sand Springs area, where we happened to have church services today. The local congregation recently bought a church for sale on the West side of Tulsa and has been in the process of converting it into a suitable building. As one might imagine, with them having been in the hall only a few weeks, there are still a few things to work out. The air conditioner wasn’t working, and we got a lot of apologies for that but such things come with the territory. The main fellowship hall, which will apparently seat about 150 people according to the local pastor, is currently having its foundation fixed and after that it will have flooring put in, with all of the work planned to be done around the time of the Feast of Trumpets. Let us hope that is the case.

As far as the messages go, my mother and I were able not only to see the services in Tulsa but also to stay and watch the webcast that the pastor’s wife’s father was running in Southern British Columbia, where we had a guest speaker who I happen to know from my travels. One of the things that is most notable about messages is that sometimes messages bring up subjects that one is talking about. For example, I was working on a sermonette about my trip to Thyatira and the minister of the webcast sermon talked about Laodicea. We had a conversation with a new member where my mother and I talked about praying for a situation in the person’s life and that came up in the sermon from the Tulsa pastor about prayer and our responsibilities whether we are dealing with a problem or not. It is nice for one’s own conversations to anticipate the messages and that is always something I appreciate. Oh, and getting a ride back to the hotel was nice too, leading to a relaxing afternoon and evening.