There was one more thing that I learned while riding the Oklahoma Freewheel bike ride across Oklahoma – and this was a fairly painful lesson. I have always assumed that as you progress in your walk with God, the refining process will deal with the bigger things in the first years and bring you to increasingly smaller issues until you’re pretty much Mother Teresa when you die. I didn’t expect God to bring to light major issues that I had not noticed all these years, like an elephant hiding behind the curtains. But He did.
When I set out on the freewheel ride, I did not know a single person out of the 800 other riders I was about to spend 8 days with. Being a closet introvert (really!), I wasn’t about to strike up a friendship with EVERYONE. But I didn’t want to be on my own for 8 days either, so I went about meeting people in the line, on the bus, etc. Some of my meetings were entirely coincidental and circumstantial. I ended up encountering a few guys on the first day and hanging with them off and on throughout the ride.
But I also found myself unconsciously judging people by external appearance: dress, overall looks, body type, age, level of fitness, accent, perceived level of education, city vs country – and deciding whether I wanted to interact with them or not.
In real life, you might see someone and make a snap judgment but then you never see them again. However, the experience of the road meant that I ended up interacting with some of my undesirables after all. This is inherent to being out on the road on a pilgrimage of sorts with these folks. You are all outside of your comfort zone, living in unusual and unpredictable circumstances where you are much more likely to need help and to speak to strangers. It is not unlike being trapped with strangers on a broken-down bus, or at an airport in a snowstorm.
In his book “The Sacred Journey”, which I had with me on this trip, Charles Foster quotes Mark Twain:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Foster goes on to say, “It is only possible to hate those we don’t understand, and it is hard to hate those we don’t understand but who have lent us their water bottles”. p. 96
For me, it happened when we arrived in Checotah. I headed on down to the Laundromat with 4 days worth of sweaty cycling jerseys and shorts. Just for the record, Carrie Underwood, erstwhile Checotah citizen, was NOT doing her laundry at this particular Laundromat, but there were several other cyclists there – identifiable by their funky tans and the bracelets they made us wear. You don’t normally talk to folks at the Laundromat but we ended up talking to each other about where we were from, the ride, etc. One guy struck up a conversation with me and I was polite (at least on the outside) but didn’t really engage with him having prejudged him as someone I didn’t really want to get to know.
Back at camp, they told us a storm was coming. I didn’t have a tent – just an air-mattress, a tarp and a sleeping bag. I figured I’d stay dry under the bleachers where we had set up camp. About an hour before the storm, along comes this guy from the Laundromat that I had kind of blown off. He noticed I didn’t have a tent and offered to let me come in his big family-sized tent if the rain got bad.
So when the storm came, and it CAME in a major way, I headed over to his tent and shared an adventure – dry in the tent, but trying to hold the walls up while gale force winds blew it almost to the ground. At 11 pm, the storm abated enough to see that the tent was ripped irreparably. The winds were expected to resume at 60 mph through 1 a.m. They said we should move into the high school weight lifting room.
Before I finally settled down to sleep that night, I had been cheerfully helped by another of the guys I had discounted. Both guys were unknowingly heaping coals on my head.
The next day, I wrote in my journal that I realized that I was judging people negatively based on what they looked like before I ever met them. A verse I had learned years ago came to mind: “The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD look at the heart.” I Samuel 16:7, where Samuel is looking for a new king to anoint, but preferred all of David’s older brothers over him. God had other criteria.
God is good at that – choosing people that the world discounts: Joseph, chosen over all his 10 older brothers. Jacob preferred to Esau (even when Jacob was such a trickster). Abel over Cain. Moses the stutterer over his eloquent brother Aaron.
Thankfully, God looks at us and sees what we and others can not see, often choosing for the hidden potential that is not even developed yet. Consider Gideon. In Judges 6, the Angel of the Lord appears to Gideon and addresses him as “Mighty hero!”
Excuse me, but this “mighty hero” was hiding at the bottom of a winepress, threshing his wheat in secret so the Midianites would not take it by force. And he needed not one but two fleeces before he was sure God really wanted him. But God saw him as the Mighty Hero he would become, not the unsure man of little faith.
Before this trip, I had always thought I was above shallow prejudice. I work overseas and am usually the first to welcome and interact with people from other countries and cultures. Race or nationality was not one of the factors I was judging people on this week, but that still left me with a full quiver of distinctions to make among the Americans I met on this trip: most of it came down to simple physical appearance and socio-economic class and education.
Fortunately, this was trumped by good old fashioned Okie friendliness which surprised me to no end.
In Foster’s book, he says that the Kingdom of God “is all happening at the edges, in the forgotten places, in the places you can’t get to by car or where your auto insurers wouldn’t let you drive, among the people you’ve put out with the trash.” (p. 78).
Lord, help me to see your image in each of your creations and not put people out with the trash!
