While wrapped in God's grace, we seek to become more like Jesus in all that we do, including when we're riding a bike. Growth doesn't just happen and change doesn't occur in comfort, but through challenge - through embracing challenge as a unique opportunity to be shaped in ways only God can shape us.
Cyclists understand the idea of “growth” naturally in terms of performance. Any sport has a certain trajectory of growth for those who pursue to improve - runners run faster or longer, soccer players handle the ball with greater grace and skill, basketball players make a higher percentage of their shots.
Cycling is no different: find the key performance indicators in your discipline of choice, set a plan to improve those things, and then go about doing the work. Ride faster or farther, learn race-craft, find the perfect line on singletrack, sprint with greater power.
We understand that growth happens through challenging ourselves. To become more powerful, we need to do things that are gradually harder and requiring more power. To ride farther, we need to gradually increase the distance we can ride.
Here’s the question: do the challenges we embrace on the bike change us in any positive way off the bike? Who are we becoming based off of the trajectories of growth we choose on the bike? Do our pursuits on the bike lead to any kind of flourishing off the bike? What kind of ideals are we working towards and to what end?
Embrace challenges as an opportunity to grow
flourishing growing towards ideals actions improving as they become more true to ideals
you will know them by their fruit
fruit of the spirit
Footnotes