Tandem Bike Ride With God

I used to think of God as my observer, my judge, keeping track of the things I did wrong, so as to know whether I merited heaven or hell when I die. He was out there, sort of like a president. I recognized His picture when I saw it, but I didn't really know Him.

But later on, when I met him, it seemed as though life was rather like a bike, but it was a tandem bike, and I noticed that God was in the back helping me pedal. I didn't know just when it was He suggested we change, but life has not been the same since I took the back-seat to (God) Maharaj. He makes life exciting. When I had control, I thought I knew the way. It was rather boring, but predictable. It was the shortest distance between two points.

But when He took the lead, He knew delightful long cuts, up mountains, and through rocky places and at break-through speeds; it was all I could do to hang on! Even though it often looked like madness, He said, "Pedal!" I was worried and anxious and asked, "Where are you taking me?" He laughed and didn't answer and I started to learn to trust. I forgot my boring life and entered into adventure. And when I'd say, "I'm scared", He'd lean back and touch my hand.

He took me to people with gifts that I needed, gifts of healing, acceptance and joy. They gave me their gifts to take on my journey. And we were off again. He said, "Give the gifts away; they're extra baggage, too much weight." So I did, to the people we met, and I found in giving I received, and still our burden was light.

I did not trust Him, at first, in control of my life. I thought He'd wreck it, but He knows bike secrets, knows how to make it bend to take sharp corners, jump to clear high rocks, fly to shorten scary passages. And I am learning to shut up and pedal in the strangest places, and I'm beginning to enjoy the view and the cool breeze on my face with my delightful constant companion.

And when I'm sure I just can't do any more, He just smiles and says... "Pedal."

www.sikhsangat.com

posted 3 August 2009

 quoted by Erin D Maughan  BYU Devotional 4 August 2009

How We Wrestle Is Who We Are

by Brian Doyle - January/February 2005 issue - Orion Magazine

MY SON LIAM was born ten years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round as a cucumber on steroids. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart. You need four rooms in your heart for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three, so pretty soon doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour while they made repairs, and then when he was about eighteen months old he had another surgery, during which they did more tinkering, and all this slicing and dicing worked, and now he’s ten, and the other day as he and I were having a burping contest he suddenly said, “Explain to me my heart stuff,” which I tried to do, in my usual Boring Dad way, and soon enough he wandered off, I think to beat up his brother, but I sat there remembering.

I remember pacing hospital and house and hills, and thinking that his operations would either work or not and he would either live or die. There was a certain clarity there; I used to crawl into that clarity at night to sleep. But nothing else was clear. I used to think, in those sleepless days and nights, what if they don’t fix him all the way and he’s a cripple all his life, a pale thin kid in a wheelchair who has Crises? What if his brain gets bent? What if he ends up alive but without his mind at all? What then? Who would he be? Would he always be what he might have been? Would I love him still? What if I couldn’t love him? What if he was so damaged that I prayed for him to die? Would those prayers be good or evil?

I don’t have anything sweet or wise to say about those thoughts. I can’t report that God gave me strength to face my fears, or that my wife’s love saved me, or anything cool and poetic like that. I just tell you that I had those thoughts, and they haunt me still. I can’t even push them across the page here and have them sit between you and me unattached to either of us, for they are bound to me always, like the dark fibers of my heart. For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. What we want to be is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that’s why we have these relentless engines in our chests, driving us forward toward what we might be.

Eventually my son will need a new heart, a transplant when he’s thirty or forty or so, though Liam said airily the other day that he’s decided to grow a new one from the old one, which I wouldn’t bet against him doing eventually, him being a really remarkable kid. But that made me think: if we could grow new hearts out of old ones, what might we be then? What might we be if we rise and evolve, if we come further down from the brooding trees and out onto the smiling plain, if we unclench the fist and drop the dagger, if we emerge blinking from the fort and the stockade and the prison, if we smash away the steel from around our hearts, if we peel the scales from our eyes, if we do what we say we will do, if we act as if our words really matter, if our words become muscled mercy, if we grow a fifth chamber in our hearts and a seventh and a ninth, and become as if new creatures arisen from our shucked skins, the creatures we are so patently and brilliantly and utterly and wholly and holy capable of becoming…

What then?

 

In His Head - On Marriage and Divorce

By Brian Doyle -

I am not so stupid as to make any public comment whatsoever about the character and nature and music of my marriage, which I understand less about year by year anyway.  My marriage, like every other marriage that is or was or will be, is different from every other marriage, and my marriage changes shape every 11 minutes or so, and my marriage, like every other marriage, is ultimately an utterly ephemeral thing, a shared idea, a mental and emotional constrict which both parties believe in to varying degrees at the same time or else there you are at the bus stop muttering about how you used to be married.  Also, the person to whom I am married, or to whom I was married 11 minutes ago, is a mysterious, changeable country whom I simply try to savour and appreciate rather than attempt to understand, or God help us all, predict in any way, shape or form whatsoever, such predilection to prediction being the surest road to muttering at the bus stop.

Yet there have been many riveting moments in my marriage and I recount them here cheerfully so that you can tell me what they mean, for I have no idea.  Like when our three children were hauled wet and startled from the salt sea of my wife’s womb and I saw her spleen and thin layer of subcutaneous fat, which I thought was pretty cool but she didn’t.  Or the time we lost a baby in utero.  Or all the times she has fallen asleep on my shoulder watching movies and the way she wakes with a start and asks anxiously did she drool or snore?  Or the way she becomes so absorbed in the paintings she paints that she loses track of the time and hoots with surprise when she realises how late it is.  Or the way she reads by the fire wrapped in a caftan.  Or the way she forgets the milk for her coffee is boiling and yelps with surprise every single morning when it boils over.  Or the way she loves to work in the yard, rain, or sleet or shine.  Or the way she laughs from the very fibre of her being sometimes with a dear friend on the phone.  Or the way she loses her temper sometimes suddenly and slashes and slices with a stunning tongue.  Or the way she retires upstairs sometimes in tears, overcome by exhaustion and rude children and unsubtle husband.  Or the way she our love affair has waxed and waned and ebbed and flowed and worn so many different coats of motley that sometimes I conclude it has died and sometimes I am agog that it has been born once again miraculously from ash.

Many times I have concluded that all marriages are nuts and my marriage is nuts, but I find myself delighted by her company which is endlessly stimulating sometimes in ways beyond hilarity or sensuality and sometimes in ways so frustrating and heartrending that I go pray and walk and hum and fold laundry and recall that I am no gleaming, glittering prize either, I am just a guy, muddled and humming.

I remember everything, I am memorious, that’s my gift and my curse, and I remember the way her voice once came shivering out of the dusk, telling me about her dad who had just died whom she loved madly, she was his last child, his late-surprise daughter, and I remember the quiver of joy in her high-beam eyes when we danced on our wedding day, swinging each other so fast and wild that if either let go we’d still be orbiting Neptune, and I remember the million hours she rocked and consoled and bandaged and fed and cleaned and snarled at and sang to our children, and the million hours we have wrestled with ideas and locked limbs, and I know the sound of her sob, and the lilt of her laugh. The lurch of her logic and the flare of her fury, yet after 20 years I know her hardly at all; which may be crucial for marriage is a verb, and why I am married, and why the most momentous moments of my marriage seem to me to be incontrovertibly and inarguably the next 11, of they come, which I hope they will, I pray they will, though no-one, including most of all me and my wife, knows if they will come, or what they will bring, which seems to me somehow the secret of the whole thing. 

But what do I know?

The Tiger's Whisker

An Old Korean Tale 

The story is of Yun Ok who came to the house of a wise sage for council.

 “’It is my husband, wise one.  He is very dear to me.  For the past three years he has been fighting in the wars.  Now that he has returned he hardly speaks to me, or not anyone else.  If I speak, he doesn’t seem to hear.  When he talks at all, it is roughly.  If I serve him food not to his liking, he pushes it aside, and angrily leaves the room.  Sometimes when he is working in the rice field, I see him sitting idly on the top of the hill, looking towards the sea!  I want a potion, so he will be loving and gentle as he used to be.’

 

“The wise sage instructed the young woman to get for him the whisker of a living tiger, from which he would make the magic potion.

“At night, when her husband was asleep, she crept from her house with a bowl of rice and meat sauce in her hand.  She went to the place on the mountainside where the tiger was known to live.  Standing afar from the tiger’s cave, she held out the bowl of food, calling the tiger to come and eat, but the Tiger did not come.

“Each night she returned, doing the same thing and each time a few steps closer.  Although the tiger did not come out and eat, he did become accustomed to seeing her there.

“One night she approached within a stone’s throw of the cave.  This time the tiger came a few steps toward her and stopped.  The two of them stood looking at one another in the moonlight.  It happened again the following night and this time they were so close that she could talk to him in a soft, soothing voice.

“The next night, after looking carefully into her eyes, the tiger ate the food that she held out for him.  After that when Yun Ok came in the night she found the tiger waiting for her on the trail.  Nearly six months had passed since the night of her first visit.  At first, one night after caressing the animal’s head, she said, ‘O generous animal, I must have one of your whiskers.  Do not be angry with me.’  And she snipped off one of the whiskers.

“The tiger did not become angry as she had feared that he might.  She went down the trail, running with the whisker tightly clutched in her hand.  When she brought it to the wise sage, he examined it to see if it was real, then tossed it into the fire, causing the poor girl to become stunned.  Then the sage said, ‘Yun Ok, is a man more vicious than a tiger?  Is he less responsive to kindness and understanding?  If you can win the love and confidence of a wild and bloodthirsty animal by gentleness and patience, surely you can do the same with your husband.’”

 

Forgiveness

"Start building that bridge of forgiveness even when the waters of disappointment and anger are still flowing underneath." -Steve Arterburn on Joyce Meyer Ministries

Amateurs!

"Amateurs!  they don't know when to keep their mouth shut!"
Law and Order Television programme

Be Happy

"If the only way you can be happy is to have a perfect day... you are in trouble!"
Joyce Meyer