The Road to BAK

Elkhart to Pleasanton, via Kansas

This morning, I loaded up all this gear and head to Elkhart, Kansas for the start of Biking Across Kansas. 

I feel this same sort of excitement and energy every year (albeit mixed with a measure of self-doubt and trepidation about whether I’ve trained enough to be ready). 

But this year feels a little different, a little more. 

I think it’s sometimes easy to forget what this life is supposed to be. 

We are indoctrinated from birth with the idea of compulsive consumption. Our world tends to measure success by the accumulation of too much. It feels to me as if we’ve fallen into a worship of wealth, where our meaning and purpose has been stripped away and our new highest calling is unending acquisition. 

Nearly all of our popular entertainment serves to remind us that we’re not enough. We could always be happier, prettier, smarter, richer, and more like these people who clearly have it all figured out. So we keep on reaching, and trying to meet these expectations that came from somewhere else. 

And our souls still feel empty. 

The old writers talked of Providence - a word that’s all but fallen from our modern lexicon. Its plain definition is “the protective care of God or of nature as a spiritual power.”

I don’t know how, or where, you feel Providence. But I have never felt its presence in the things that I own. I’ve never felt it in stacking money against another's' and reveling in the differences, or in unending consumption. I’ve never felt it in the empty expectations of another, or in the trap of comparison. 

I feel it in the alignment of souls. I feel it in the strain of effort toward a goal that’s good. I feel it in a deep embrace, in shared compassion. I’ve felt it in laughter, and in  tears shed in the revelation of humans who have shared similar suffering. 

And I find it here, at this time every year, on the open Kansas horizon, in the small-town warmth, with people I love, doing something that lights our hearts and souls aflame. 

I don’t know where one finds Providence, but I’m sure it’s not where we’ve been told to look.

I just hope you find it, too, and that you remember, and never allow it to be separated from you again.