Once upon a time there was a little girl with curly red hair, purple glasses, and big aspirations. She was terrified of riding her bike without the training wheels, but one sunny afternoon her mother gave her a big push and she sped off down the long sidewalk, smiling ear to ear the whole way. She did it. From that day on she told her mother that when she grew up she was going to be a professional bike rider.
Albert Einstein once said, "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving."
It is now 13 years later, and no, I do not still want to be a professional bike rider. But I do still enjoy riding my bike.
See from the time we are little, we attempt to take control of our lives. We make plans for the future and set goals for ourselves. A very common question that children are asked from a young age is, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
And while it is often trivial to hear some of the answers children have to these questions, what 5-year-olds actually have is a true idea of what they are going to do with their life. I didn't. I went from wanting to be a bike rider to an author to a rock climber to an Olympic track runner. Then when it came time to go off to college, where it is actually beneficial to have an idea of what you want to be. I had no idea at all.
Of course, it all worked out. I am at college now studying Communication and Spanish, but I still do not know what career path I wish to take. But I am not worried, and here's why: I have made many plans for my life and so many of them have not worked out the way they were supposed to. Yet looking back on it, I would not change my story.
To give some examples: when I was in the 3rd grade I absolutely hated running. I would hide in the bathroom so I wouldn't have to run the lap in PE class. I never would have expected that in 5th grade I would be joining a track team and winning a championship. Nor that I would spend the next 8 years of my life committed to the sport and end up running for a college team.
I used to be afraid to go underwater. Never would I have thought that I would grow to love wake boarding and water skiing, or that I would learn to swim well enough to do it in a triathlon. I used to be shy and timid in Spanish class, I had no idea that I would end up studying it and becoming so proficient in it that when I traveled to Mexico, I was able to serve as a translator. I look back on all these things I once thought I had my heart set on, but I overcame so many fears and I wouldn't change one bit of it.
Yet there is the opposite side of things, too. I used to want to be an Olympic athlete in the high jump, but sometimes life intervenes. You get hurt or you stop growing, and all professional high jumpers are at least 6 feet tall. I planned to go on my first mission trip to Mexico to build houses perfectly healthy and strong. But God wanted me to go with a dislocated finger, making it challenging to even hold a hammer.
The thing is, we are constantly trying to write our own stories, but life, and particularly God if you will, tend to throw us curve balls. I would argue that 9 out of 10 times, things do not go perfectly as planned. And I think that is what Einstein was hinting at with his bicycle quote. Life is one long bike ride, and sometimes, we will be peddling uphill and sometimes, we will be gliding downward.
Sometimes it will rain, sometimes it will snow. Sometimes there will be blazing heat beating down on us. Other times the wind will be pushing us. The path may be jagged and rocky, but then it will be flat and smooth. In order to not lose our balance, we must learn to accept that we cannot control what life throws at us, we can only control our willpower to keep our legs moving and our patience in knowing that we will reach our final destination.
If you had asked me 3 or 4 years ago, I would not have told you that I was going to go to Pepperdine. When I pictured college, I pictured a big public university with a football team and huge brand name. Yet here I am at a small private liberal arts school, and I would not change it for the world. In fact, I wouldn't change any part of my story, even though I really haven't written any of it. Because looking back on it, I see how God used every part to bring me to the place and the person that I am today. Which is why I encourage everyone to let go of the control they think they have in their life and let the True Author set His perfect plan into motion. All we can do is keep peddling and have faith that He will lead the way.
