God Makes a Way

Nick Bollhorst loves the great outdoors! "I enjoy coming home at the end of the day, especially in the warmer months and just spending some time out there." 

Some of his favorite childhood memories were spent on the road with his parents, camping, hiking, and fishing. As an adult, he no longer had time for those adventures. Instead, he was working, day and night, at two dead-end jobs.

Nick recalled: "I was working in a manufacturing facility. The night shift was always harder on me. So that's six at night to six in the morning. Where I was working, their overtime had cut back. So, I took up a job driving a cab, and I would drive on my days off, and I just forced myself just to work through it and do what had to get done and make it happen." 

Nick and his wife, Susan, a stay-at-home mom, needed the extra income to support their growing family. Susan recalled: "We were 20,000 dollars in debt." Nick added: "We had used credit cards in a lot of ways." 

They found ways to cut costs. They got rid of their cable, traded in their van, and sold other personal items. Nick and Susan had been taught the biblical principles of sowing and reaping. So even as they were paying down their debt, they tithed.  

Nick said: "We didn't stop and think, okay, how are we [going to] pay our tithe check this week? We just did it." 

Susan remembered: "I did feel like it was a, a stretch at first [because] we didn't have the 10% in our budget, but we put our tithe first."

Within three years, they paid off all their credit card debt. Meanwhile, Nick dreamed about making a living from work he really enjoyed. They prayed and asked God about the right idea for a family-owned business. "And I started reading a lot of books by a lot of different Christian authors -- about how when God has a plan for your life, He's [going to] give you a small dream, and it's [going to] start out as a seed, but you have to nurture it."

After taking a camping trip out west, Nick got that idea: help other families enjoy their own adventures. And so, they bought and started renting out – a 20-foot camper. Immediately, they made a profit and started tithing off their earnings. Susan recalled: "I was working out of our little sunroom taking calls and just making it work." Nick added: "And I would service it and get it ready to go out on trips. I built my own website back then in 2002."  

Soon, they bought a second 28-foot camper, and shortly after that, they bought a third. The business "Scenic View RV" was born. Nick reported: "We did reinvest our profit back into the business. We're able to pay down, of course, the loans that we took on the units, pay them off, and we just kept reinvesting back into our business."

They also invested in others. Nick said: "We certainly gave us the ability to not just increase our tithes, but, to even sow a little bit more into some, different ministries that we were, that we were seeing and felt like there was a need for." Susan added: "The more we learned about CBN, the more we saw they were doing God's work. They were helping those who needed medical help and couldn't afford it." Nick reported: "We've always really liked and had a passion for the overseas ministries, and Operation Blessing is there. Whether it's natural disasters or programs going on to different outreaches --it's just always held a place in our hearts." 

By 2005, Nick was finally able to leave his manufacturing job and devote his full time to "Scenic View RV". Every year since then, business revenue has increased. Now, they're making ten times their first year's revenue. Best of all, this job lets him do what he loves.

Nick stated: "I knew that I had the work ethic. I just needed the right vehicle. And with God's, you know, hand on our lives, it was, He was able to point us and get us into the right vehicle."

Nick and Susan were able to get their children through college debt-free. Now, as grandparents, they are creating the same memories with their family that they once enjoyed themselves.

Nick concluded: "In Malachi, it states that when you, when you give your tithe, He'll open up His storehouse and pour out a blessing that you can't contain. And so if we do what He instructs us to do, He's not [going to] fail us."