Today, on this Sabbath, mountain biking has reminded me the Deep.
My two-wheeled ride had been out of commission since last fall, the new chain doesn’t fit the other parts, aged eights years and uncooperative with change. I decided to go regardless. After a brief stop at the gas station for 75 cent air, I arrived at high noon, the weather, hot, sticky, beautiful. The iPod was set to the “Fargo or Bust” mix, opening with Coldplay’s latest Violet Hill. After that, “Something” by The Beatles came on, and I took the ear buds out, tucking them safely into my generic Camelbak straps.
It was time to listen, not to rock.
Work is now downtown, a quick-and-blessed 180 from nearly two years of laboring from home in a small office adjacent to the room where I sleep. Now, our space has been multiplied many times over, with new front-window views of city streets and people everywhere. I’m also considering a personal move downtown to centralize life.
Our space sits on the entrance to a section of the city called The Heartside District, “known for its compassion,” according to a local website. Our street hosts the main hub of the city’s homeless shelters, food distribution organizations, artists, hipsters, punk rockers, mentally handicapped, the list goes on.
Along with all the beauty and diversity comes an equal amount of noise.
I found myself surrounded by silence, minus my breath and the rhythms of the woods. As I peddled down the trail, I was reminded of my physical being. Much of my daily work is thinking, talking, assigning language and images to ideas, clicking and typing, making agreements.
Lately, I’ve been eating like a college student—an unbalanced diet with too much junk food, rarely sitting down for a meal, (minus my mandatory breakfast involving eggs or French toast). The discipline of exercise has been washed away by deadlines, though I know the stress we carry in our bodies, if not properly dealt with, will make itself known.
But there, in the woods, my body was tested. It reminded me of our frailty and strength, of the importance of others coming alongside to refine and push us, as I was passed by a much more experienced rider, who motivated me to peddle harder.
As I began to think about our physical bodies, I thought of the dwelling of Christ in us, how the Scriptures describe our physical beings as temples of the Holy Spirit, as living sacrifices, and the closeness and unity and reverence these heavy statements imply.
And how often I forget these truths.
It made me think of physical desire, how strongly we’re wired for physical connection, how in the beginning the LORD decided, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Friends in The Song of Songs repeat, “Do not awaken or arouse love until it so desires,” while Ecclesiastes (and The Byrds) speak to proper timing, saying, “To everything, turn, turn, turn. There is a season, turn, turn, turn.”
And in moments of peace, how we bow submissively to His timing, and at other times, we wrestle with two clocks: “one God’s, one mine.”
The green trees quietly spoke of the original order of created things, and I caught a sliver into the ecstasy of God walking with Adam in the Garden before the Fall. It was a reminder of how Adam enjoyed his work as I was enjoying the ride, how the death and resurrection of Christ is the “second Adam,” how Christ’s restorative work is fully underway in the here-and-now through the mystery and power of the Trinity.
(Culture tells us to think of work as our identity, something to be segmented, defined by money, but there is good work in the unpaid as well as the paid. Oftentimes, the former is more fruitful.)
The woods remind me that order will reign when I lie down in my grave and ascend to be with God, that someday our existing Earth will also be re-ordered and restored, as Derek Webb puts it in the aptly titled song, “This, too, shall be made right.”
A remote click to the news clarifies that we must be people living with hope, not just academically or intellectually by cleverly adopting churchy buzz-words, but having hope we can feel in our guts, living people who truly believe that in the end, [Insert your current crisis, problem, emergency, hopelessness, etc.,] “This, too, will be made right.”
In the morning I read a chapter on “recollection” by “my favorite monk Thomas Merton,” who wrote of the balance of internal and external peace and the disconnection we must make from results and measurements of the world in order to successfully live in it.
The ride reminded me of the beauty I’ve seen, so concentrated in the last two years through travel and encounters with God and people. For a moment I felt like the famous Yankee Lou Gehrig, who once called himself “the luckiest man alive.”
Michigan’s forest stirred up stored images of the Amazon and climbing trees and shooting blow-dart guns, of walking through the jungle with the Waodani, seeing firsthand how the Creator provided the unthinkable: a tree root that lulls fish to sleep and draws them to the surface of the water, allowing the Indians to pluck large fish with wooden spears and feed a tribe.
As I was cruising down a hill, across the 2 x 4 bridge over the small river, I sensed it was time to stop. Laying my bike down by the river and putting the headphones back on, I caught the end of U2’s Grace, and its lyrics, “Grace, a thought that changed the world,” flooded my mind.
I’ve been the recipient of much grace as ointment for various trials over the past two years, from financial graces to spiritual and relational graces. Lately, I’ve been listening to a Caedmon’s Call song, Lead of Love, which says,
Looking back at the road so far
The journey's left its share of scars
Mostly from leaving the narrow and straight
Looking back it is clear to me
That a man is more than the sum of his deeds
And how You've made good of this mess I've made
Is a profound mystery
Looking back You know You had to bring me through
All that I was so afraid of
Though I questioned the sky, now I see why
Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Looking back I see the lead of love
Looking back I can finally see (I'd rather have wisdom)
How failures bring humility (than be)
Brings me to my knees (a comfortable fool)
Helps me see my need for Thee
I’m certainly still in the stage of walking rocks (and perhaps for the majority of our lives we always are, we just may have multiple mountains to climb), but we’ve been given glimpses of hope in recent times.
Slowly, I’m learning to hold onto life much more loosely than in the past, a result of experiences where I’ve squeezed hard and stubbornly, only to have the mini-worlds I’ve created destroyed, so proper orientation can be restored.
The next song was Out of the Woods by Nickel Creek, triggering thoughts of all the beauty that is to come. The trail is full of mud, hills, rocks, roots, trees, obstacles. It is always changing, much like life. In Africa, we went whitewater rafting on the Zambezi, wedged between Zimbabwe and Zambia. “The river is different every day,” the tour guide said, who had been riding its waters for seven years.
Merton said that each of us is constantly changing—the changes we make either take us closer to the person The Maker intended to be, or further away.
May we all pursue the people we are intended to be, with hope of seeing the mountain view.
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