At the beginning of January our son’s bike was stolen. We have a lot of experience with stolen bikes. Even using locks, we’ve all lost at least one.
Andrew had his bike taken off of the back of our van, while locked, as we drove to California. Another was taken from church doors, as it leaned against a huge glass window.
We’re no longer shocked by people’s audacious depravity, but this bike was different because it’s Elijah’s electric trike.
Elijah has muscular dystrophy, and this bike has given him a bit of freedom. The thieves actually broke into our garage sometime while we slept. (Our dog, Chesterton, has proven a bit of a disappointment.) Regardless, they boldly entered and took it away to who knows where.
We immediately made a police report, and I posted on a local Facebook community page. People left little sad-faced and angry-faced emojis and promised to keep an eye out. Two weeks passed with nothing.
Then, suddenly, I got a message from someone who thought they had seen the bike. I shared the post and asked people to please message me if they saw it in the area.
Overnight, the Chilliwack community went wild looking for my son’s bike. I started getting messages all day long from strangers with tips. My posts were shared on other pages, a local newsletter, and even on the radio. We started to hope that the bike might actually be found.
One afternoon I saw a fellow trudging in the snow with a red trike, but, alas, through some strange coincidence, two red trikes were in the hands of Fairfield Island vagrants. It wasn’t ours. And worse, it was the bike that everyone had been messaging me about. This poor fellow had had the entire city glaring at him, or worse, for a week or more. I tried very hard to get in on the different pages and posts to clarify the differences in the two bikes, thanking everyone, but asking that they wouldn’t scare the wrong man.
Amazing people offered to replace the bike, or to start a fund. God was working hard to remind me of how many kind people are left on this planet.
A month after the theft, I got a message from another stranger, with the same picture of the same wrong bike. I thanked her for caring, and then I just gave up. It had been a month. Elijah’s bike was gone.
Thirty minutes passed, and the same woman messaged again. “Is this the bike? Someone just posted this.” I looked closely and gasped. This one, after so many others, was actually the right one. And it was about three minutes from my house.
Scott, who was at work, called the police (to no avail. They never picked up the phone.) I got in the van and thought I would just ... drive by? I’m not sure what I thought I would do. I only ever got a yellow belt in tae kwon do. But I drove over, and there it was.
Two big guys with a truck were in the parking lot of a run-down motel, talking to someone. I pulled in, and they nodded to let me know they were taking care of it. As soon as they had seen the post, they got up from whatever they were doing and drove over to help. Seeing that I was overwhelmed, they kept telling me not to worry, they would get the bike into the truck and drive it to my house. “We’ll take care of it,” they kept saying, whenever I got flustered or cried.
They brought the bike to the house and happily accepted a jar of honey and a bottle of moonshine. (They were bikers, they said; of course they wanted moonshine.)
As we chatted in the driveway, I found out a little about them, the hard lives they had lived, and that one of them in particular, since he was off work with an injury, had been driving around every time he saw a post with a tip. He had made it his mission to help a family he’d never met. Talk about a tonic against cynicism.
I told him that they had brought us a lot of joy, as had the hundreds of people who had been following the trail along with us. What a gift to hear the good news that all their efforts had been fruitful. I thanked God that it was this man in particular who found the bike. He had invested a lot in helping the underdog. He deserved the blessing of being successful in goodness.
It’s been a week, and I’m still receiving messages and posts from hundreds of people I will never meet, so happy to have seen their community bring about a good ending.
So, it has me thinking about man’s desire to do and be good. We are all capable of thievery, but we are also capable of greatness. Inside each of us there is a little imprint, the fingerprint of God maybe. And despite our brokenness, we, at the very least, want to want good. People want a chance to be helpful, kind, and generous, because, even without knowing him, they want to resemble their Father.
And that is why we must receive gifts from others with graciousness, and why we must never stop evangelizing. With God’s grace and the life-giving gifts of truth, good humans can grow into great saints. So, lock up your bikes, people, and, as Paul told the Galatians, “let us not grow weary in well-doing.”
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