280. Keep Pedalling
My youngest daughter asked me to take the training wheels off her bike this week. She tried riding two wheels before, but she got scared. But for whatever reason, she was motivated to try again, so she asked me to teach her how to ride the two-wheels. I set up her bike, but I had a bit of doubt if she can master it quickly. As I taught her, she did pretty well, but she often stopped pedalling every time she felt like losing her balance. I taught her to move the handle to keep her balanced and told her to continue to pedal even when she feels unstable. Our first session ended well, but she still couldn’t ride it on her own.
However, the next day, she hurriedly came to me and asked me to come out. She wanted to show me something. As I walked out, she hopped on her bike, and started pedalling confidently forward, and she was riding it on her own. I was ecstatic and told her how much I was proud of her success.
As I was happily taking video of her first two-wheels bike riding success, I was reminded how we have a tendency to stop the most important thing when our life seems unstable, and we feel like losing control. The worst thing we can do when trying to ride a bike well is to stop pedalling when losing balance. In the same way, it is easy for us to try to live this life well without doing the most critical thing when life becomes shaky.
In Christian life, what keeps our faith going is trusting God. There are times when life gets tough and the last thing we want to do is to trust God. Because life often seems to provide enough evidence that he isn’t worth trusting.
The way we keep our trust in God is to continue in spending time in God’s Word. Unfortunately, this is the first thing Christians stop doing when their life gets busy, unbalanced, or unstable. Because of that, even with their best effort, their life stops moving forward to God’s calling for them. And when we stop moving forward, we don’t just stop making progress; we actually fall.
I went through many ups and downs in my life, but as I look back, what kept me grounded was spending time in God’s promises, encouragement, and correction through his Word, which I tried my best to do every morning. Every so often it was only a few minutes, it kept me moving forward and allowed me to stand more than falling.
