Two-Wheel Freedom
“He’s like a prisoner set free,” I told my husband as I tried to describe on the phone what I was witnessing through the front window. Three-and-a half-year old Joshua zoomed in circles, jumped off of curbs and raced across the driveway on two wheels. Liberated from the cumbersome training wheels that mere hours ago had seemed like a safety neccesity, my littlest boy had just discovered the thrill of a “big boy bike.”
Joshua’s graduation to a two-wheeled bike has unlocked new worlds of pedal pleasure. He’s enjoyed adventures on abandoned baseball diamonds where a quick kick of the brake creates thick clouds of dust or a brave jump over the pitcher’s mound leaves chunky tire imprints in the soft dirt. He’s wheeled near the lake and investigated the resident wildlife with new-found zeal, and he’s zipped across the yard scattering soft piles of freshly-mowed grass like an autumn breeze spreading crunchy leaves. He’s biked through mudpuddles in the rain, mastered homemade driveway obstacle courses, and soared beneath the stars with a flashlight duct-taped to his handlebars. All with a priceless expression of awe plastered on his face.
Joshua’s training wheels left our home on garbage day last week. The tiny tires were nearly bald. The once-silver metal was rusted and bent. For a moment, I expected my youngest son to protest when he spotted his old wheels sticking awkwardly out of the trash can. But as I lugged the bulky garbage bin to the curb, my son’s eyes lit up and he said, “I didn’t know how much those training wheels were slowing me down, Mom. I don’t EVER want to use them again!”
While Joshua explores new heights of biking, I am watching and wondering. I’m wondering if there are training wheels in my life that need to go, habits that I justify in the name of “safety” that simply need to be trashed. In my practical quest for security, have I settled for three-wheeled crutches that keep me wobbling along a wide road of comfort when, in truth, I’ve been created to zoom along the narrow path? What liberation awaits if I shed those unsteady wheels and learn, instead, to jump. To coast. To speed. To soar off of Calvary’s mound of grace and leave tracks of joy in the soft dirt of this earth.
The Overflow: Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Hebrews 12:1
