Bike Riding.
Bikes are grade school cool here in France. They make special lanes throughout the city and cars yield to them like they are the police or something. It has quickly become my preferred means of travel since it allows you to avoid traffic and burn some calories (which everybody tells me is something I need to do more often). Convinced it was time the boys got in on the action, I bought Deacon a scooter and Chi his first real bike. A quick note about scooters here in France… adults use the mess out of them. I pass tons of full-grown adults gliding their razor scooter to work everyday. At first I thought they were all a bunch of special people heading to Euro Disney, but now it’s clear that they just prefer ‘scootin’ to work. “Welcome to France,” I tell myself. Anyway, instead of getting both of the boys each their own scooter, I figured it was time to get Chi his first real bike and begin to let him explore a new frontier of freedom. I paid bottom dollar at a gypsy garage sale outside a carnival for this road warrior machine. Only after utilizing my Middle Eastern haggling skills, of course. After surveying many prospects we settled on a slightly rusted silver bullet kid’s bike with two flats. It was a Diamondback brand made of pure steel and undaunted hopes. Its only real accessory is a bell that Chi thoroughly tested before I threatened him with a stare that can only mean instant wrath. Nevertheless, he was crazy stoked to have this treasure. In response to my statement that all good steads deserve a name, he responded that its name from henceforth shall be “Optimus Prime.”
He pushed the bike home for nearly a mile on double flats with pure joy radiating from him. Joy I wish I could bottle and sell on the open market. I wonder why we forget to enjoy things the way kids do sometimes.
Fortunately for Malachi, his dad is a shade tree bike mechanic. After he lobbied me like a persistent widow until all peace had left my life, we finally set apart a time to restore this hardware to its former glory. While I worked on the bike, he was attentive to my every move like a nurse looking over the shoulder of a surgeon. Taking notice of this, I soon dished out some very critical tasks for him to accomplish: wash this part, throw away this piece of trash, hand me that tool, etc. You would have thought that I had asked him to help me work on something about to do a moon landing. Soon “Optimus Prime” was ready to roll and we hastily put on what my grandma used to call “outside clothes” and made for the nearest park. It is worth noting that I do not remember learning how to ride a bike. I remember getting a bike and being told to “figure it out,” but beyond that it’s really cloudy. I remember learning without training wheels or a helmet and since we did not have training wheels or a helmet, Malachi was going to learn like his ancestors before him.
I find it interesting that humans, when learning that certain activities are bad for their heads, invent helmets instead of ceasing to do said activity. Just a thought for reflection.
So we walk out to the bicycle path and I give a short dissertation about how bicycles work and their impact on society… which Chi is paying attention to like there is going to be a test later. He looks confident and determined with his newly developing furrowed brow stare. In that moment, a metric ton of emotions hit me. My head drifts into thoughts of us riding the mean streets of Paris together. My share of his genetics alone will cause him to ride like he was born into the saddle. For goodness sake, his mother was a cowgirl for a significant portion of her childhood. The kid is a shoe in for success. Honestly, in this moment I am battling back high hopes of his future in the Tour de France.
We post up and begin to take off with me doing the dad support thing since we are a “no training wheels” kind of family. Then after picking up speed and me only slightly letting go… he eats it. Hard. Small sacrifice for the sake of progress I tell myself. That blood on his legs is good for something. I dust him off and set him up again, glancing over my shoulder to see if Whitni saw that out the window and if so what kind of discussion about parenting are we going to have later.
We do this for a few dozen times before I realize something no dad wants to admit to their son. That he is really terrible at this.
My first red flag should have probably been when he mounted the bike it was like he was about to do a wrestling move on the contraption. What is more, in his mind he cannot function with the thought of me not holding on. He is afraid he will wreck if he doesn’t feel my presence. He fears the crash that comes without me bringing the balance. I totally get that. After seeing a few of his nastier crashes, I agree that his fears are legitimate. Very legitimate. In this moment, what do you do? Resign to say that it is not for him and that he should move on with his childhood? Tell yourself that it is probably his mom’s genetics? Or just pick him up? Long ago, the Lord taught me the power of picking others up. Picking them up and looking them in the eye; it’s important.
In light of this, I just scrap my joint world cycling tour with him and just love him through his fear of being separated from me. I pick him up from the place he fell and go from there. There is a powerful truth almost so familiar that we forget it, that is, that EVERYBODY starts somewhere. It’s really hard to get our minds around the fact that other people start somewhere differently than we did. For instance, the other day I ran into one of my Muslim neighbors after dropping the kids off at school. We began to discuss what brought our family here and how we have near family who are Arabs in Bethlehem. The conversation soon turned to G-d and the Lord opened up an opportunity for me to share the Gospel with her. We had a very meaningful conversation about the differences between Jesus and all other religions and how He has changed my life. It marked the first time I got to share the Gospel in French and the first time she had EVER heard the Gospel in any language. I am not sure where you are coming from as you read this, but I would bet that most of you did not hear the Gospel for the first time from a mustached American speaking broken French phrases while you were wearing a Muslim hijab. She did though. She started right there. She had great questions and was crazy intrigued by what has up until this point been unavailable to her. She didn’t start at Sunday school or at a building: she started on a street corner in a conversation with someone who cared for her.
Something I have learned along the way as a teacher is that the best coaches or teachers excel at taking people from where they are to a place they could never have fathomed they could go. This has been repeated over and over in the NBA where the hardest thing for a coach to do in the league is to develop players. Can you take them from wherever you find them and grow them into fully mature adults, skilled at what they are called to do? This is why, for me, discipleship is the hinge on which all ministry turns.
We are in the people developing business. This is why we see ministry as a process, not a destination. This is why we are really prone to picking people up wherever the fall has allowed them to fall. Jesus is the reason we do not give up on people who may be really terrible right now at this Jesus thing.
That brings us back to a bloody kid who has gotten the wrong end of a rose bush and is sitting there picking gravel out of his kneecap. I pick him up, look him in the eye, ask him if he is tough (we are Corsauts mind you), and sit him again in the saddle. This time I put my hands on his, taking control of the handlebars for him. I pushed him like this until my cardio gave up on me. After an old man break, I switched to holding his seat and pushing his back. Soon I was just balancing the seat with one hand. None of these milestones was obvious to Chi who I was constantly challenging to just keep pedaling. All attention was on moving forward and he became oblivious to the fact that my hands were no longer on the handlebars.
I almost chuckled to myself when I thought about how many times Jesus has told me to keep pedaling/obeying and all the while he was doing things to build my faith that I was completely unconscious of.
The funny thing is that after a while I let go and he was riding by himself (mostly unaware) for maybe 2.7 seconds. He got up like he just won some kind of trophy. It was intense.
Think about this: He celebrated more the times he did it when he couldn’t feel my presence than the times I pushed him for miles and my presence was clearly perceptible.
It’s not like I wasn’t right there with him, but when he did it when he couldn’t feel my help was a bigger victory than doing when he could. After all the time we spent together than evening, what segment of time do you think he ran in telling his mom about? If you guessed the 2.7 seconds then you should get a prize, but sadly we are on a tight budget. Really though, these small spaces of fear conquering confidence that the Father is with us even though there is a clear absence of “feeling” is something powerful that I have been wrestling with. Consider for a moment that G-d does not train us in this way so we can do less together, but more.
He is not cultivating independence, but is extending an invitation to ride around France with him one day. He is extending an opportunity to be a part of bigger things with scarier fears. David killed the bear and the lion protecting his father’s sheep long before he killed Goliath to protect his heavenly Father’s sheep.
You are not ready for those hurdles yet, but you are in a perfect place to trust him for what is before you here and now. While we all start somewhere, he wants to take us places we could never go on our own. If we let our fears based on our early failures dictate the rest of the story, then we can go ahead and mark our stories down as tragedies. He is introducing you to how joyful obedience to Him conquers crippling fear of failure. He is allowing you to fail forward and enjoy the ride.
Welcome to the scary process of discipleship, welcome to the way of Jesus.
Listen: go with Him to places you would have never gone if you stopped peddling. Let my son tell you that bloody knees are not a reason to quit learning. Do you trust His ability to coach your heart even though your eyes are filled with tears and yesterday’s sin has you covered in dirt? He doesn’t want his kids to miss the experiences he has dreamed up even if it means picking up a couple battle wounds. So, as I wash my hands in the bathroom I laugh at Malachi’s retelling of the adventures he had with his dad. He was so near death that they became friends. He talks now as though he was going so fast that he out ran the wind. Where riding a bike is like riding a bull. It’s tale of courage and the joy wedged in 2.7 seconds.
“If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
-C.S. Lewis