Riding helped Me Escape

In my teenage years, this kind of trek was a common occurrence. Wherever I went, I rode. But one thing I never had when I pedaled was a purpose. I liked riding. Riding took me away from my home more quickly. It brought me to my friends’ houses, whose families were still together, where angry fights and shoving matches weren’t likely to randomly break out. It took me to the arcades, to parks, to the creek; Riding was my ticket away from the reminder that my family was broken, away from loneliness. But as much as I loved riding, there was one thing I could never ride away from: I might have fun at my friends’ houses, but I always had to ride back home, where I was reminded of what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t keep my family together.

My parents divorced when I was nine years old. This event was devastating, there’s no way around that, but I won’t pretend that everything was perfect before the divorce. There were drugs involved, lots of partying, and as a result of all of this, my father wasn’t really there, even though I saw him mostly daily. After my parents’ divorce, I saw my dad every other week, but he was working and was frequently gone on the weekends. When he was gone, that allowed me plenty of time to look for his stash of adult material (including a reel-to-reel projector complete with filthy movies), which I’d discovered when I was six, but which he kept moving. My mom eventually married a guy who was abusive, and between my father and stepfather, I had no men helping to mold and shape my concept of what a man was and was for. My life was filled with fighting and yelling. Every man in my life was dismissive, abusive, and more interested in his own pleasure than fathering an increasingly rebellious teen boy, who didn’t know what it meant to be a man.

I pedaled down a country road behind my friend, Justin. The sun was hot overhead, and we felt every gust of headwind keenly as we struggled to make way through the windswept dust. We were headed toward Oakdale, a neighboring town that I had driven through on trips to the mountains but had never gone there myself. I was going to see a girl; who else could get a fourteen-year-old to hop on a bike and ride 12 miles one way? We had rigged up multiple 2-liter bottles in our backpacks with tubing to make sure we had enough water we could drink on the way in the storied Central Valley heat. I had talked to this girl on the phone, but today I would meet her parents, her sisters and brother, and finally meet her. The year was 1991, and mobile phones and texting were still more than a decade off. Aside from a verbal description of her appearance from her and my friend, I didn’t even know what she looked like. Would there be attraction between us? Would her family like me? Her parents seemed religious, so would my broken family be an obstacle?

That relationship wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, but in another way, it changed the entire trajectory of my life. You see, her father was religious, and very quickly he determined that I was a young man in need of a Father. No earthly father would do, for “it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in mam” (Psalm 118:8). This man knew that the fathers in my life would let me down, but there was one who would never leave me, nor forsake me (Deut 31:6, 8). He made it a requirement that I come to church with their family to see his daughter. When I protested that I didn’t have my license and could not ride to Oakdale every week, he reassured me that it was no problem for him to pick me up and bring me home every Sunday. While at a youth conference put on by a Christian radio personality who assured me that he knew many of us needed a father and that the Father of Heaven was the Father who would never bail on us, I trusted in Christ and the Triune God of the Bible began to change me.

Even after the girl and I broke up, I found another church. I continued to grow and to be transformed. I learned more about the God who never forsook me. I learned more about my own sin, and became aware that I had a long, uphill battle. As I looked at the requirements in 1 Timothy and Titus for becoming a pastor, or father in the Church, I recognized that a godly man was very different from every example I’d ever had set for me in life. A father should be sober-minded, but every father I’d ever had was more interested in drinking and drugs than almost anything else. A father should be self-controlled and gentle, but the fathers in my life had often been unpredictable and violent. A father should be dignified, and should not be quarrelsome, but if one word could describe my relationship with my fathers, it was “combative.” What had been modeled and drilled into me throughout my life was licentiousness, drunkenness, selfishness, lust, and violence. When my boat was rocked, I reacted in the way I had been trained, and this could not last.

I had a new nature, but putting on the new self (Ephesians 4, Colossians 3) was like pedaling uphill against a stiff headwind. It was hard work, and I was untrained in it. I got married to a wonderful Christian woman, and for the first time in my life became part of a Christian family. My father-in-law is a gracious man, who saw me as different, and his consent to my pursuit of his daughter was the first drop of water I’d tasted on this long, hot bike ride I called my life. I became the head of a Christian household, and every day was a reminder that I was not fit for the role.

I pedaled my way on the Dry Creek trail, dodging walkers, unleashed dogs, and weaving through the gnarled oak trees and tall grass. My boss was ahead of me, and keeping up with him was no longer a possibility. We met downstairs at the office and rode out to the trail together, getting a ride in at lunchtime before returning to the office to finish out the day. I was thirty-five years old, with a wonderful wife, a son, and a baby daughter. How far I’d come from when I was a teen, riding this creek bed with my friends! And yet, in my heart, I was still that young man; I still sought my own pleasure and desires. I struggled with pornography, one of the legacies I had been bequeathed by my fathers. I struggled with reacting in anger and impatience to my wife and children. The lunchtime rides helped get out some energy, but if I was honest with myself, I was spiritually stagnating. It was like riding a bike with a trailer full of concrete hitched to it. I needed to cast off the sin that so easily entangled if I was going to make progress in my pedaling through life. I needed a purpose. I’d never been nourished with life-giving words, and I doubted myself all the time. I had no store of energy that I could draw upon to pedal through the long trek through life.

By the time I was thirty-six years old, my wife and I had found a church where I was surrounded by men who routinely spoke life-giving words into my life. I confessed to my pornography use, was set free of that sin by the Lord Jesus Christ, and these men around me helped me as I stood morally upright for the first time since I was a little boy, thirty years ago. One night at a men’s gathering a few years later, some of these men, men involved in leadership in Christian Service Brigade, who saw that I had been starved of life-giving encouragement and uplifting speech, told me what they thought of me and how they saw me. I wept openly. I’d never been spoken over and upheld by the fathers in my life. These words of encouragement fell on my ears as water on a dry and thirsty land. The effect that a single evening of encouragement had on my life reminds me every day as I lead my wife and children, as I mentor the young men in my church, as I teach and preach to the families at my church. Young men need fathers. They cannot pedal effectively without training, without nourishment, and without encouragement.

Ministries like Christian Service Brigade mean that young men who would otherwise pedal without a purpose like I did for most of my life will have fathers around them to speak the kind of encouragement that strengthens their legs and causes them to lean over their handlebars with determination. These young men, guided and upheld by the fathers in their CSB Battalions will be the next generation building the Kingdom, singing Psalms, and doing battle against the enemy. Men who have been fathered, and mentored, and had the Word of God applied to every area of their lives from some of their earliest days will be the future pastors of our churches, builders of families and communities, and leaders of the world. Founder of CSB Joe Coughlin said that Brigade wasn’t started to do something for boys, but so that boys (and eventually men) could do something for Christ. That vision of a world shaped by the kind of men who come out of Christian Service Brigade is what excites us about the future God is building through this ministry. Won’t you join with us by Pedaling for a Purpose this May?