Approaching eighty years, he had been frugal and had provided well for his financial needs. He came by my office to say hello. It was not the visit that surprised me, but how he got there. Sidney had a can route that he ran every day. He put wire baskets on his old fashioned bicycle and would ride up and down his self-appointed route and pick up cans on the side of the road. He was not doing it to keep the highways clean. He was earning money, as meager as it might be.
One day I went out in front of the church building just as he rode up. His bicycle was what I would call a piece of junk. It was at least twenty-years-old, had only one gear, and wobbled as he rode. Since I knew he could afford anything he wanted to buy, I asked him, “Sidney, why don’t you buy you a new bike, a ten-speed bike?” He thought for a minute and then answered, “Well, I can barely use the one-speed I have.”
Sidney grew up in a time when one-speed bikes were the norm. It had been that way for seventy plus years and he was not going to change something that worked. He was right. His bike did work. It worked, but there was something better. A few years later, Sidney died and he still had that one speed bicycle.
It has been many years since that event, but every so often I remind myself about Sidney’s one-speed bicycle. I think about it when I get stuck in how things used to be. I think about it when the church gets stuck in how things used to be. We love “how things used to be” because we know how things worked out when things were like they used to be. The future is unknown and in an effort to bring comfort to it, we cling to “how things used to be.”
You cannot go back in time. Well-adjusted, happy people are people who can look to the future and embrace whatever change it brings. As Christians we do not know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future. That is enough for us.
Lonnie Davis
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