Holding things together

Sometimes, I don't even need to get on the bicycle to get a good lesson from it.

Last night, I checked the tread on my tires.  Wow.  I still have knobs, but they aren't knobby anymore.  More like bumpy.  Chunks of the knobs are no longer there.  I don't think they grip anymore; rather, they mildly resist sliding.

Obvious decision: Change the tires.  I wasn't sure if I was going to ride to work this morning, but I thought it made sense, and would take 15 minutes, maybe.  I flipped the bike upside down, and took off both wheels.  I got the tires off, removed the old tires, and put on new ones.  Very pretty and clean and with well-defined bumps.  I pumped up the tires, and prepared to put the wheels back on the bike.  Putting on the rear wheel, I was having a challenge getting it into the dropouts.  That wasn't unusual: What was unusual was: the derailleur and derailleur hanger were no longer attached to the bike. Ack!  Okay, throw it in reverse, and see what happened.

I was missing one screw, and the other had come unthreaded, but was still on the hanger.  I don't know if this had happened as a result of my crash in November (that story gets its own post).  But one thing seemed apparent: the back of my bike was held together by a stack of parts.  The quick release held the derailleur hanger (mostly) in place.  When I removed the wheel, everything came apart.

I received two lessons from this one.  First of all, I want to examine what is holding me and my life together.  Am I leaning on a stack of worldly things that, if a single item is removed, everything else falls apart?  Or, am I really and truly relying on the immovable Rock?

The other, more obvious one, was that I contemplated riding at all.  If I rode, there would be no way that I could go to my son's Bible Olympics today across town.  I knew my wife wouldn't be able to be there for the whole thing, so he may have won, or not, but wouldn't have a parent to share the moment with.  He had practiced a bunch.  And here I was, ready to ride my bike to take care of my own wishes instead.  I have plenty of opportunities to ride.  To make this extra clear, when I had the bike kind of assembled, still missing a screw, one of the tubes had gone flat overnight.  I got the point, finally.

I went to the Bible Olympics.  Only two kids got all the verses correct.  My son was one of them, and I got to hug him.  I am thankful for my bike's mechanical failures.

I hope I can save my bike more damage and remember this lesson.