Biking.

I love it. Exhausting, exhilarating, exhumable. Wait, I don’t even think that’s a word. Anyway, it’s my favorite low impact activity.

Last year, I spent a lot of time biking and one of the places to bike was a path near work. This wasn’t one of those rails-to-trails paths. (You can read how I feel about those at my previous post here.) This was a ten mile loop that had been laid out in such a way that each way you curved, you were facing into the wind. Like those eyes in paintings that follow you everywhere. I’m trying to think of a time on that path when I felt like the wind wasn’t blowing against me.

Not to mention that path was hilly. Yes. Hilly. Here in Illinois. The wind could sometimes be so bad that going down a hill, I couldn’t even coast enough to get momentum to go back up the hill! All I could do was pedal: against the wind, up the hill, pedal, pedal, pedal!

I remember thinking, “Shouldn’t coasting allow me to get ahead? Why do I feel like I am not going any where.”

I am feeling that way in life too. Sometimes, if I pause enough to look at my life I think, “wait, I am not getting any momentum in life.” I think this because I am stupid and I forget that I have an education without debt, a book published before age thirty, a full-time job at a ministry that is about evangelism and discipleship. Friends and family that I actually like.

But my life doesn’t look like what I thought it would when I was in my teens or early twenties, and I equated my dreams of security with God’s peace. I want to coast through different choices. God doesn’t promise that. In situations in our lives, sometimes I think part of God’s plan is to allow us to feel insecure. To feel unsettled. In those times, I believe God is saying,

“Trust Me. I am your security.

Lean on Me. I have the answers.

Have faith in Me. I am in control.”

God doesn’t always call us into easy lives. I know that in my head, but I don’t like to see the reality of that in my life, any more than I like pedaling up hill against the wind. (Always the wind!)

Answers, control, security – I want them all. I want peace and ease. God says, “Ask for my wisdom, and I will give it. Look to me, I will never leave you nor forsake you.” No matter where you turn…He is always there.