A Ride Proves We Can Make the World a Better Place. TOGETHER!

“Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.”  --Marian Wright Edelman

I always cry at the end of the ride. Tear up. Get choked up when I finally arrive at the finish.

Let me start at the start. In a little more than a week, August 5^th to be exact, me and about 6,000 other cyclists will ride up to 211 miles in two days, as we all participate in the Pan Mass Challenge (PMC). If you’ve noticed more bikers on the road these past few weekends, many of those are PMC folk getting in their final training miles before the big day or days. For more than forty years, the PMC has raised almost $900 million for the Dana Farber Institute, Boston’s world class cancer treatment center in Boston. Our 2023 goal is $70 million, and every dollar goes to the cause.

It is a ride of amazing numbers.

At its longest point it stretches all the way from the rolling hills of Sturbridge to the rolling dunes of Provincetown, more than 200 miles. I’m cycling one day from Wellesley to Bourne, about 82 miles. It takes a good while to get from here to there. I’ll start out at 7 am or so in the morning and arrive at the bridge (God willing and good weather!) by 3 pm or so. And yes, by the end my backside is pretty sore. One metric I found estimates that me and the folks on my route will circle our pedals some 55,000 times that day.

I do the PMC for lots of reasons. It gets me off the couch and on to my bike, forces me to get back into shape each spring and summer. I ride for the people I love and at the church I serve who have cancer or who have succumbed to cancer. I always carry their names with me: Scott, Uncle Billy, Uncle Mark, Nora, T. Michael, Sue, Dorothy, Lynne…that list is a long one.

But hope lies in the truth that in the 13 years I’ve ridden, the advances in cancer care have been almost miraculous. The PMC has been a big part of those breakthroughs at the Dana Farber.  I also ride for the thrill and the fear of actually riding a bike that long a distance. Each year I wonder: can I do it? I ride for the discipline it forces me to have every summer.  Can’t fake it. Either you can do it or can’t and the day of the ride is always crunch time. I ride because the life I have is a pretty darn good one and so my faith and my conscience tells me that it is my responsibility and call to help others. To do some good while I am here. To share the abundance of my life with others.   

One of the biggest reasons I ride is to just be a part of something bigger than myself.  To be involved and in the thick of a great cause, a bold crusade and to do that with thousands of other amazing people. While out on my training rides I inevitably see at least one other PMC’er and we nod in recognition and sometimes we even yell out encouragement to one another. “Have a good ride!” “Be safe!” “Good luck!”  There is a power and a grace to being a part of such a world changing group of people.  All of us pedaling and straining and working and trying our best to achieve these simple goals.

To beat cancer once and for all. To find a cure. To give hope to those who are sick and to their loved ones.

So, if I may do so, on behalf of all the PMC riders and volunteers and staff: if you are a praying person please pray for our rides. For safety. For cool temps and maybe even a cloudy day! (Last year was almost 100 degrees and full sun.) Pray for the folks in your life who have cancer, and those who have passed on, and those who grieve and those who are still fighting.

We are living in very toxic times in a very toxic world. It’s even fashionable, especially among the political elite and media, to be cynical about the world.  To tear down others without a thought. To talk not of the good but instead to always focus on the bad. To look out into God’s Creation and feel not hope, but instead despair. 

But when you get to be in community with almost 10,000 people for the weekend, people who want to be a part of the solution, people who want to do good, people who smile through the sweat, people who just keep pedaling…you get to see the world can be a beautiful place too.

If you see us on our bikes in the days ahead or on PMC weekend, please give us a wave and we will wave and smile right back at you. Maybe that might make you feel more hopeful for the world. Imagine having the faith that a small group of committed people, working together, can absolutely can actually make a difference.

Change the world. Heal the hurting. Comfort the afflicted. And all on two wheels and under human power and grit. Nothing more.

It’s for all these reasons that I cry each year when I get to the foot of the Bourne Bridge and then cross the finish line and remember and celebrate that I am a part of something bigger than myself. That all of us can make this world a better place, if we believe and if we get to work.Together.

That’s how I’ll be spending the first weekend in August. See you on the road!

(If you’d like to donate to my ride, go to: https://profile.pmc.org/JH0352)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.