Boehmer’s wagon train cuts through Troy
Published 12:40 am Sunday, March 1, 2009
Don’t ask Randy Boehmer how he finances his mule-drawn mission wagon.
He won’t tell you. He will simply say, “God provides.”
No matter where Boehmer sets up camp each night he gives no thought to tomorrow. He is confident that God will make a way for him because he is certain that he is doing God’s will for him.
“No, God does not talk to me,” Boehmer said during a stopover in Troy Friday. “He speaks within me and He laid it on my heart to travel around the country in a covered wagon telling people about Jesus and the one Living God.”
And, it’s hard for Boehmer’s message not to be noticed, if not heard.
He travels the highways and byways on a covered wagon pulled by four Belgian mules with “Jesus Saves Ask Him” emblazoned on the sides in bold, red letters. Trailing behind is a covered feed wagon with “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shall be saved and thy house. Act 16:31.”
“That’s the message I want people to hear,” he said.
For more than 40 years, Boehmer was leading a busy, fast-paced life as an Arizona taxidermist. If traveling the country in a covered wagon telling people about Jesus ever crossed his mind, he had long since forgotten it.
It was not until his mother died in 1991, that be realized that there’s more to life than material wealth.
“We were cleaning out the garage and my sister told me and my brother to throw whatever we didn’t want in the dump,” Boehmer said. “What my parents had worked so hard for really meant nothing. I realized right then that there was more to life than things for the dump.”
After Boehmer’s wife died of cancer in 1998, he started reading the Bible and began to think about his soul and heaven and hell.
“Jesus came into my heart and I was saved,” he said. “I knew what God wanted me to do – travel the country in a covered wagon telling people about Jesus.”
Boehmer attended Bible school so that he would know more about the Bible as he traveled the country.
In an issue of “Mule and More” magazine, he found a couple of mules for sale in Bedford, Ind. He bought the mules, learned to drive them and then worked with a horse shoer to learn to shoe his mules.
After long years of preparation, on April 1, 2008, Boehmer embarked on the journey of a lifetime.
He is crisscrossing the country with his four mules – Frank, Jessie, Dick and Jack – and two dogs, Shep and Proverb. His covered wagon has all the comforts of home, including a solar panel that powers the lights and other things electric. His mule-powered home averages about four miles-per-hour and that’s plenty fast enough for Boehmer. He’s got nowhere in particular to go, just a message to spread about God’s love and His redemptive powers.
He left Pike County headed to Florida but, if the Lord sends him on a different path, that’s the one he’ll take.
Not many people could or would make the journey that Boehmer is on. It’s not an easy road to travel. Setting up camp at night, caring for his mules and then breaking it down the very next morning is long, hard work but, then, not many people get to journey the road less traveled.
Boehmer knows he is blessed that God chose him for the journey of a lifetime and for a lifetime.