A Life in Parables

The Bicycle
It is Christmas time again, and my thoughts run back to my youth. One of the most memorable Christmas mornings started out not so great! This Christmas I had asked Santa (the real Santa) for a bicycle. I was about 6 years old, and I did not have a bike. This was the year, and I was pumped about receiving a bike for Christmas. Now with the knowledge of who Santa was, I started looking all over the house for the bicycle as I knew it had to be somewhere. Initially, I thought maybe my parents had not purchased it yet, as I examined every corner of the house (after all, a bike is large) but could not find it. It had to be there, somewhere. Every time Dad left our home I secretly watched him return to see if any wrapped gifts the size of a bike showed up. This behavior continued all week long until Christmas Eve when I once again searched high and low (in the attic, in the crawl spaces, and everywhere else) and there was no bike to be found. I went to bed that night, knowing that no bicycle was to be delivered and Christmas was going to be void of a set of wheels! I was determined to make the best of it, however, knowing our family was not made of money and bikes were expensive.
Christmas morning was like every other. Judith, my sister, and five years my senior, would wake me and we would wait at the edge of the living room ʼtil mom and dad entered so they could see us getting the gifts. And let the games begin! We started opening presents. I found a good number of packages with my name on them and I was excited to open each one. After about 30 minutes my Dad said, “Jack, what about that?” I looked over and there it was—a brand new bicycle. I ran around the bike on the way to the tree that morning. Now isn’t that crazy? The very thing I wanted I could not see. The item that was there the whole time I missed. No one could believe I didn’t see the bike until Dad pointed it out to me.
I started thinking that our lives are just like that. We start out thinking we want this or that, and after many years of not finding those things, we convince ourselves they are not going to be part of our lives. After a while, we could not see them even if they were staring us directly in the face. The mind is a controlling force in our lives; it rationalizes everything to make sense of things so we have a sense of completeness or being ok. But what if there were gifts we had been given but could not see? What if those gifts were from above, explicitly provided to us, and we had let Christmas pass without opening them. Maybe we had allowed all the Christmases to pass without opening them. I can assure you our minds can direct our attention to other things and miss the gifts we may have been given.
So how do we find all the gifts we have been given and not let our human experience blind us to the possibilities? How could we have our attention redirected to see the presents granted and start to open them one by one? As Christians, we have been given gifts of the Spirit to unwrap while we are here on earth. It may just mean we have to believe, just believe, to see them and maybe we must trust the Giver of the gift for their function and their suitability to each of us individually. The Bible says God does supply these gifts free to each of us if we only start to look for them.
Now bicycles are not much good sitting in a living room or a basement; they are meant to be ridden! So, as it is with our spiritual gifts, even if others cannot see them, we may start to. We may also discover where they came from, and we may begin to know how they are to be used. I can tell you that learning to ride a bike was very difficult and I fell many times before I could coast down a hill. Learning to use these magnificent gifts we have been given may also be quite testing, yet that bike took me places I could not have dreamed of that Christmas morning. I am convinced we will go places and see things we could only have imagined if we start to use the spiritual gifts we have been given.
So, I pray that this Christmas you search under, around, on top of, inside, outside, and everywhere else for what is evident to our Father and invisible to us!