I open up the blinds on my bedroom window and look out at the world. I was hoping for a better forecast when I went to bed last night, one more promising than the cloudy and cool conditions predicted for today.
It’s grey, overcast, not very spring like, not what I
hoped, for my first ride of the new cycling season.
That’s what I tell myself, chilly first day of April, a Monday, Easter Monday. Twelve days into spring. One day since Jesus rose up from the dead, but me? I’d like to stay down all day, thank you very much. Recline on my soft couch. Sip smoky dark coffee. Read the news on my laptop and rest.
He may be risen but this pastor is bone tired and weary from a week of non-stop services. So many sermons preached, and lots of prayers pronounced, and hundreds of hands shaken, and several Easter hymns sung and one 6:15 am sunrise seen and a schedule like no other time of year. Hence my prevarication about getting back on the bike again, after six months off.
It’s too cold to ride. Maybe later in the week. Just a few days more to wait.
This is New England spring after all, a most fickle and unpredictable season. In 1997, in a meteorological April Fool’s Day joke, mother nature sent 25 inches of snow to these parts. Last week ice cold needles of rain fell almost every day, chilling me, drenching me, soaking everything and everyone. Today is not as dramatic weather wise but rushing out to the car late this morning to retrieve my favorite “Baseball Hall of Fame” thermal coffee container from the car, I was barefoot as I skipped across the driveway. My toes curled in at the coolness of the pavement.
I can always ride in another day or two. Yeah, that’s it. Who’s going to know?
Then I open an email and it’s from the young man I’ve hired to help me train this year for the summer charity bike ride I’ve done for the past fourteen summers. Almost 100 miles in just one day. “Enjoy your first ride of the season!” he enthusiastically instructs me. I’d forgotten I told Owen about my sometime yearly tradition of riding on Easter Monday.
Damn it! Now I have to ride. No excuses.
I go out to the garage and examine my just tuned up bicycle. It’s a deep blue color, all sleek and straight lines, thin black tires built for speed in the front and back, handlebars just waiting for someone to grip them again, to take this twenty-three-pound cycle out for a spin.
Can I still do it? Ride ten or twenty or forty or eighty miles? I don’t know.
This bout of insecurity hits me every year, just before I take up my bike again. I worry about being able to make it up the first big hill of the season, to spin the pedals eighty revolutions per minute, thighs burning, lungs huffing, butt stinging, hands numbing. If I’m not careful I might psych myself out but then I remember. Most springs, most Aprils, since 1995, almost thirty years, I’ve mounted up on my two-wheeled conveyance, and ridden, ridden again. Still, it feels like the first time ever.
Relax. Just do circles on the pedals. Just spin. No rush. It’s not a race. Enjoy it.
That’s my inner voice of calm, or perhaps God, reminding me that the ride is not about going the fastest or proving something to someone, no. It’s not a race or competition to win or lose. It’s about the joy of watching the world go by at twelve or thirteen miles per hour, and hearing the quiet thrum of the wheels beneath you as they glide across the blacktop, and listening to the “clack, clack” of the gears as they shift, and watching as a hawk lands on a tree just into the woods on your right and feeling the sun as it warms the skin on your arm.
Feeling more alive somehow.
I can do this.
First ride. Saddle up. Spring calls forth, to me, to you, to all of us. God declares, “Begin again.”
Ready?
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.
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