For the past six years I have been one of the people everyone calls crazy when I participate in a 3 ½ day bike trip that travels 300 miles from one state to another. I’ve always loved it; the people you get to know, the fun you have but most of all the dozens of life lessons you learn.
Bike trip isn’t easy. Actually if you’re not someone who exercises a lot, and if you haven’t trained enough prior to bike trip, it can be very painful. You learn perseverance, and you develop a back bone for pushing even when it hurts. You learn that you need other people, to pull you in draft lines, and to encourage you. But most important you learn that it isn’t all about you. Other people hurt, everyone struggles at some point and everyone needs encouragement and love. This is a lesson I have had to relearn year after year. This year though, I began to see this concept in a new way.
Each day we are given a Bible verse to tape on our bike to read throughout the day. The verses this year had to do with the Body of Christ.
One of the verses was 1 Corinthians 12:24b-26.
“But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 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.”
On bike trip this needed to be our mindset. We all had a different part to play, yet we were equal, none of us were more important than another. And when one of us was hurting, we all needed to be hurting along side of them, carrying their burden. I often knew when one of the other bikers was struggling. Their legs slowed up, they peddled on alone. Their shoulders sagged in. You had at that point had a choice to make, to continue on passed them or to slow up and give them encouragement or maybe pull in front of them to break the wind.
I began thinking about it, if this is how the Body of Christ needs to operate on bike trip. And if bike trip is like life, than I have been living life all wrong. People are hurting all around us. Our own families and friends are struggling. We know it yet we fail to come along side of them, to serve them and to carry their burden. Life is hard, downright painful at times. We are human and we have a sin nature. We all sin and fall short of God’s best. We fail. As Christ’s followers we have to see the hurting people and to reach out and have compassion and love them for who they are and what they are struggling with down deep inside.
I have failed to do this so many times. I have lived for myself and for my interests and have missed the bigger picture. “But if we are the Body, why aren’t our hands reaching.”
Why should we do this?
“Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” John 13:14-15
Because Jesus did so much more.
