Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Doug Bolin.
Doug Bolin was a dryland wheat farmer in Banner County, Nebraska, farming the homestead his grandparents claimed in 1910. He and his wife Joy came to the first Black Hills camp of Camps Farthest Out in 1976, and CFO became part of their lives for decades.
Doug eventually spoke at camps from Iowa to New York and California, and he and Joy also spoke at camps in Australia. He brought a farmer’s way of looking at things with him: plain, patient, observant, and not easily impressed by religious talk that had no life behind it.
Doug’s great-grandparents came from Iowa to homestead Pleasant Valley in 1886. One side of the family was Brethren; the other was Methodist. The little church on Pleasant Hill was built in 1890, with its cemetery across the road. Doug never forgot the smell of the place. “I always associate matters of the Spirit with a smell of wood burning, kerosene, and a faint hint of the last skunk that made it in under the floor of that old church.”
His grandfather Roy married Grace, a nineteen-year-old schoolteacher from Colorado, in August 1910. They filed on 160 acres and built a concrete house. The next year, Roy was injured and died while Grace was driving him to Fort Collins. Their son was born the following May. Grace came home and ran the post office out of her living room.
When Doug’s father was a little boy, he kept opening and shutting the front door. His mother asked him what he was doing. He said he was looking at the windmill. There was no windmill in front of the house. Grace knew the one she had was around back.
The boy shut the door again and looked through the keyhole. There it was. A new windmill was turning in the Nebraska wind. Grace got down on her knees and looked through the keyhole herself. She saw it too. The men who came for the mail eventually told her that a Swedish man had dug a well by hand down on the tableland, a mile back from the rimrock.
Doug told that story at camp after camp. “Wherever it begins, it’s when you see the windmill through the keyhole.” And: “Keep looking through the keyhole.” For Doug, faith often began that way. Something was there before everybody else could see it.
Royal Douglas Bolin was born on May 5, 1943, in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, the first grandchild. His grandmother Grace had married again, this time to a Swedish rancher named Alex Carlson. Doug spent many childhood nights at their ranch, where there was no electricity. In the evenings they read the Bible by the light of an Aladdin lamp and then knelt quietly beside their rocking chairs. “It was absolutely a holy of holies.”
When Doug was about nine, he went forward alone at a revival in LaGrange, Wyoming. “And I remember watching my feet go out and walk down that aisle. And I knelt at the altar and I was the only one there.” The man who talked with him afterward was John Arnold, who later became the school janitor. Doug remembered him during his rebellious high school years, even though he did his best to avoid him.
Doug married Joy McCullough on September 14, 1963. “She and I married at a fairly young age. My mother and father had to sign for me.” They honeymooned in Estes Park. The sign on the farm read: Joy and Doug Bolin, since 1963.
Doug served in the Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. His drill sergeant was named Murphy. Doug disliked him at first. By the end of eight weeks, he would have followed him anywhere. Years later, Doug could see something of God’s discipline in that experience.
Three years into the marriage, Joy had a tubal pregnancy. “She did recover.” They were unable to have children of their own, but in 1967 and 1970 they adopted a daughter and a son. Years later, at a Black Hills camp, Gene Wiesner led a memorial service for the child they had lost. “We named him. And we put closure upon him.”
When Doug’s father became unable to farm, Doug took over the family land. He grew winter wheat on the homestead his grandparents had claimed in 1910. Farming became one of the ways he understood faith. “And it’s a real faith builder because you get to watch that crop grow for a lot longer time, watch it die several times, and worry and fuss about it.”
He never pretended that farming was easy. But he did not spend his days complaining to God about the crop. “I never have gotten on the two-way and called home to the base and said, I’m cutting sorry wheat.”
He served on the Banner County school board and worked on the farm crisis hotline during the difficult farm years of the early 1980s. But the farm remained the place where he learned to wait. You planted. You watched. You worried. And eventually, you trusted.
Doug’s parents had discovered CFO at Grand Canyon. In 1976 they persuaded Doug and Joy to come to the first Black Hills camp. “At the time I thought it was coercion.” He kept coming back, usually pulling their camping trailer behind them. He had his own joke about how long a CFO camp lasted. “And every CFO camp since that time has had three days. The first two and the last one.”
Doug was open about another part of his life. He was a recovering addict and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. At Warwick in 1995, he opened a talk with the greeting used in AA. “So I just give that, toss that out there to let you know on the other side of me where I come from because I am a recovering addict.”
He did not hide the places where his life had been broken. His marriage had also gone through hard years. “But God has mended our relationship and put it back together in a place that is absolutely wonderful to be in.”
By the 1990s, Doug was speaking at CFO camps himself. He spoke at Colorado and the annual meeting in 1993, Iowa in 1994 with Anne Pierson, Warwick in 1995, and Northern California in 1999. Norman Elliott heard him at the 1993 annual meeting and made an interesting distinction. “But the thing that was something was Doug Bolin. Not the message.” That was probably one of the best things anyone could have said about Doug. The man himself mattered. In the late 1990s, Doug and Joy traveled to Australia to speak at CFO camps.
Doug’s father spent most of his life in a wheelchair. On December 26, 1998, Doug sat beside him at Good Samaritan Village in Loveland, Colorado. Doug held one of his father’s hands. His mother held the other. A nurse told them to talk to him. Doug’s father opened his eyes. He took his hand from Doug’s and placed it in his wife’s. Then he spoke. “And his last words are, I love you. Three more breaths and it’s gone.” Doug knew what that moment was worth. “I wouldn’t have missed that moment in the world.”
Doug kept prayer simple. “If there is no wind, row.” He did not think God was fragile. “He’s also big enough to stand everything I can throw at Him.” And for a farmer, prayer came before the work. “And we always need to pray before we attempt to go to the field in the morning.”
He called CFO an organism rather than an organization. He valued silence, especially the kind that forced a person to stop hiding from himself. “The Benedictine silence enables us to face ourselves.” He also understood that faithfulness does not require seeing the result. “You may plant the seed. You may never see the harvest. But that is your job, to plant the seed.”
Doug served for years as a lay leader in his Methodist church. Late in life he became part of Christ the King Catholic Church in Gering. He died on January 2, 2025, in Gering, Nebraska. He had spent his life looking through the keyhole. Sometimes the windmill was already turning.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.