The bus station wasn’t really a bus station. The woman in the convenient store directed us to a dark building which we still wouldn’t have found were it not for the family gathered around waiting for the bus. Son and daughter-in-law (grandchildren/uncle and aunt) were headed for Chiapas, Mexico, via Denver, on Greyhound. Two days later they would arrive – about the same amount of time it took Holly, my older sister, to get from Charlottesville, VA to Grand Island, NE.

I stepped on the bus, when it finally showed up 45 minutes late, and surprised Holly after two years of nothing but email and phone communication. Half the world is what kept us separated – I always heard you could dig right down to China – and I was anxious to see her as I climbed onto that dark bus in GI, NE. And it looked like she was delighted too – surprised at least, because she was supposed to get off in Kearney an hour or so later. Regardless of her initial reaction, though, we hugged like two years was a couple of days, assembled her bike with Dave and Teresa and drove the 15 minutes back to Cairo, NE where we were staying with Jess Roth’s family.

Jess Roth’s family was uber-hospitable – sweet corn, finished basements, four-wheelers, guitars, refridgerators and auto-body paint for my bike. And God was all over that place and dancing within the conversation we had with their church community. The Roth’s cooked out and people gathered ‘round to give ear to these crazy kids biking across the country. In my mind I was in traditional and conservative America. The night before we’d been at a USA Steak Buffet and heard a family talking about how “we need to build a Great Wall of China on the Mexican border.” This conversation was going to shape me and learn me – as they say. Instead, the people there wanted us to talk. I heard a lot of my community articulate pieces of their hopes and dreams in relation to the church for the first time. I witnessed change in that context and change was the last thing I expected to see in the age-old farming communities of eastern Nebraska. I talked with the pastor of Wood River Mennonite Churh who’d only come a year and a half ago after pastoring a Southern Baptist church for 6 years or so. Who is the Mennonite Church amidst the cornfields of Nebraska? Who does it need to be there? How does/should it look different than the Mennonite church in Filer, Idaho or Atlanta, Georgia?

I worked on bikes almost all day in Cairo. One was mine. For a lesson in humility (and an excecise in working against the destructive advertisement mechanisms of our brand of capitalism) I ripped off all the Lemond stickers – the ones that told everyone that I’d spent over a thousand bucks on a bicycle – and stripped the bike down to its frame for Bikemovement’s second painting project (the truck topper had already been worked on). Another bike was a baby blue Schwinn – about 20 years old and built for a someone wearing a skirt, with a descending cross bar. Jess was playing, once again, with the idea of biking with us. Originally she’d planned to ride, but logistics had gotten in the way. She’d been excited enough to solicit three old bikes from her church community that Dave and I used to build up one that would work for this trip. So with ten speeds (next to our 24’s and 27’s), a postponed moving date to Colorado Springs and a big ol’ heart full of faith that everything would work out despite the last minute (and kind of crazy) decision, Jess Roth joined Bikemovement indefinetely. We found out yesterday that ten speeds are insufficient for the steep grades of Iowa’s hills. We played this game though, called “get Jess and her heavy bike up the hills,” in which we take turns helping Jess push “Baby Schwinn” up the hill while still riding ours. The situation pushed our legs to the limit and Jess’s competitive and athletic drive was humbled for sure, but we struggled as the community that we have become and developed a few more cheesy anaologies for the church along the way.

So we have two new members (one a long-missed sister and one a good friend from college) both of whom have decided to struggle in community with us for a while. We have experienced one more shaping conversation. We are moving and shaping, being moved and shaped everyday. I’m being convinced, I think, that church is better if dynamic. It’s better if it’s in flux, in struggle, changing – like liquids – to take the shape of, become effective for and relavent to the situation in which it finds itself. I’ve never intercepted a woman who I hadn’t seen in years on a greyhound bus before. I’ve never talked with a Southern-Baptist-turned-Mennonite preacher. I’ve never convinced a person to postpone her life and bike across the country with a group of adults full of questions and longings. I’ve never done church in such an unconventional way. And I recommend all of it.

Posted by Tim Showalter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Trip06. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.