Riding for Jesus

The left pedal fell off my bicycle last night. I mean it really fell off. The axle didn’t snap, the ball bearings weren’t suddenly ejected at right angles to my direction of motion, nor did it suddenly collapse into a deformed and twisted representation of what a pedal should be. I noticed it had suddenly gone all wobbly on me so I stopped to give it a bit of a wiggle and it came off in my hand.

I wouldn’t have minded except that I had purchased the pedal not one day previously. I haven’t come to expect much from a Chinese pedal, but even in my book, a sub 24 hour life span is pushing it.

I’m not sure how the bloke at the shop managed to put it on in the first place. I’m guessing he used a shim that must have been made out of a bit of a metal coat hanger, because there was no way the thread on the tiny little axle was going to make a snug fit with the gaping hole in the crank.

And as always seems to happen, the bike was rendered un-rideable (non-rideable? irrideable? anti-rideable?) 100 yards from home and the bike shop was next to where I work about 20mins away by bike. Nevertheless, I found the pedal could be persuaded to stay in the hole at a somewhat strange angle if I always applied pressure, and so the next morning I limped in at a rather sedate pace like a WWII bomber heading for home with one engine shot to pieces

I found myself reflecting on how the pedals are probably the most important part of the bike. You can ride a bike without brakes, I demonstrate this every day of the week. You can get by without a saddle, you can even use the bike without a chain and coast along faster than you can walk, but you can’t ride a bike without both pedals. They also lend the machine its whole left-right symmetry. I know the chain and gears prevent the perfect balance, but a bicycle one pedal shy of a pair just looks plain wrong.

St Paul couldn’t have said better when, it in his first letter to the Corinthians (I think), he stated “let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband”

replace “man” with “left pedal”, and “wife” with “right pedal” and it sums things up nicely.

Of course, that substitution doesn’t work in every passage in the bible.

Ezekiel 16:32: “You adulterous wife! You prefer strangers to your own husband! Every prostitute receives a fee, but you give gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from everywhere for your illicit favors. So in your prostitution you are the opposite of others; no one runs after you for your favors. You are the very opposite, for you give payment and none is given to you.”

But it got me thinking. There could be a market opportunity here. At first I thought I probably shouldn’t go there out of respect for my more spiritual acquaintances back in Texas, but a quick search on Amazon revealed that several people had got there before me. Okay, it wasn’t quite along my lines of ‘miracle of the bicycle pump’, ‘St Paul getting a puncture on the road to Damascus’ or ‘The Confessions of St Augustine Landis’ but there certainly seems to be plenty of people willing to throw something together and cash-in in the name of the Lord. Basketball, Baseball & Golf seem to be already covered in the form of spiritual reflections for the avid golfer and so on, e.g.,