“Ready for the countdown? Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.” Jess chanted before she slowly began to stand up after our lunch break in the shade of a tall red barn-like building on the side of the highway. She, as well as myself, was one of the newer additions to the bike movement and still getting used to what peddling a bicycle all day does to your leg muscles. It was our third day of riding and despite being exhausted I loved the challenge of spending whole days using my body to transport me across the country and using my mind to juggle questions of God and church with those around me.

After returning from a cross cultural in the Middle East this past semester, I have become increasingly aware of how much stuff I have and how much stuff I consume. After spending a semester living out of a suitcase and seeing people living on much less than myself, I feel that I could do a lot of paring in my life to find what is really important. And it is a matter of injustice (Micah 6:8) that I should have much more than I need while much of the world has less than their needs. It is challenging for me to begin to address that in my life; the culture around me is constantly telling me to consume more, that I “need” the newest, fastest thing on the market. Part of being on bike movement for me is to look at simplicity. On this trip I can get to the basics of life and have everything I need in a backpack. In addition to exploring simplicity in my own life, I wonder what ways the church might speak to these issues.

Is the church going to be a form of counter culture to reject “stuff” as fulfillment and to right the injustices of too much and too little in the world?

Another issue I have wrestled with in the past couple years is how to work out my theology in and around the context of a postmodern, pluralistic, western life. I have a lot of questions about what is the truth and then how I should live my life accordingly. As Henry David Thoreau says, “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, this is, and no mistake.” Often as we are biking we ride in pairs talking about whatever is on our minds. As we come to know each others’ lives and stories we can become vulnerable enough to work through the hard questions together. For me this is one way of trying to find what Thoreau calls “reality.” And as we visit churches we try to bring this spirit of conversation to them- to ask what is church and why do we do it. For me it has been a wonderful experience, so much so that I decided to stay for the whole rest of the trip instead of heading home in Indiana.

Posted by Kristen Swartley

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 10:00 am 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.