Bicycling From Behind

My family and I have taken to going on bicycling rides around our neighborhood when we can. It’s good family exercise and we’ve been enjoying it. However it can be a challenge to do this with my youngest. She’ll be 6 soon, and sometimes she still has problems riding up on the sidewalk or watching for cars. What usually happens is I usually lead and my husband usually rides at the end so that he can watch out for her. Often, I don’t even realize they’ve stopped until I’ve turned around. She’s stuck in the grass, her wheels have turned, and she wasn’t going fast enough over the bump in the sidewalk. Dan’s already there helping her, and I’ll stop and we’ll all wait until we can get moving again. Sometimes it turns into a cheering season where we all start chanting “GO! Go! Go! You can do it!“ Stopping like this can get a little frustrating, but our youngest needs the help.

I was thinking about this as we were out riding the other day, and how it relates to the church. Ideally like a family when the new believers come into the church we should treat them the same way. If their struggling in an area we should all encourage them. We shouldn‘t be so caught up in ourselves that when we see them struggling we just leave them out on a busy street. It would be horrible for us to do this to our youngest daughter, but yet why do we do this so often to people in the church. We have so lost the idea that the church is a team or family, and therefore needs to start acting like it.

I suppose this topic is one of my soapboxes and if you‘ve read my book you know this by now. But watching my daughter who needed help from a grownup reminded me we can‘t live our lives so busily caught up in ourselves. But we must remember those around us.

1 Corinthians 12:25-26 “so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

I realize this concept is lacking in the body of Christ, but God’s design is that we would *gasp* really love each other. His design is that we would help each other. His design is if someone is struggling on the side of the road we don’t just leave them there. Ease is never an excuse for not doing God’s will. It may be easier to keep on going, but it’s not what God would want. God has awesome plans for your life. He has awesome plans for theirs. Get excited!