A Silent Ministry--to Cyclists


I'm grateful to a churchmember who shared with me what I think is a great article blending many of the loves that motivate this blog. It's a "crossroads" article for sure: an intersection of simple quiet Christian ministry and the sport of cycling. I find it particularly helpful in this time when our church is wrestling with ways to be missional from the grassroots up. There are so many ways we can make Christ's love real--and here's one. Hope you enjoy it!

A secret refuge

In a 'silent ministry,' church offers bed, shower, kitchen to exhausted cyclists crossing country

By Kathy Hanks - The Hutchinson News - khanks@hutchnews.com

For years, Zion Lutheran Church has kept a secret.

But that's how silent ministries work.

During the summer months, families in the neighborhood might have noticed bedraggled strangers showing up at the red brick building. They'd arrive on bikes during the early evenings. Then leave early the next morning, appearing clean and refreshed.

What many people don't know is that for the past 36 years the small church at the corner of 11th Avenue and Washington has been a welcome refuge for exhausted cyclists crossing the country.

Listed on adventurecycling.com, the church basement is certainly not a five-star hotel. But the bike hostel offers a roof over cyclists' heads, air-conditioning, beds with clean sheets, a shower and even a kitchen to cook a hot meal.

Reservations aren't necessary. All a cyclist passing through Hutchinson must do is stop in at Harley's Bicycles and pick up the key.

The church charges nothing for the service, though some leave a donation. All cyclists have free rein of the building.

"There is definitely open trust," said Harley Phillips, an avid cyclist and former owner of the bike shop that shares his name, and a cradle member of Zion Lutheran Church. "It's a no-pressure thing. You come and go, and do what you want."

The silent ministry began during the nation's Bicentennial Celebration, which inspired a bike-across-the-nation movement.

The church is five miles off the transcontinental trail, and so is the bike shop. Because there aren't too many bike repair shops directly on the route, Phillips said the cyclists would stop in. At the time, the church had a two-story parsonage next door that wasn't used during the summer. The congregation decided to open it up for the travelers. They added more beds to the upstairs bedroom, and the church ladies agreed to wash the linens.

"It turned out to be a wonderful outreach for the church," Phillips said.

When an addition to the church was planned, the parsonage was torn down. Now, the cyclists stay in the church basement.

The Rev. Henry J. Hartman said the church was allowing the Holy Spirit to work through its members by touching the many lives of people they didn't even know.

"This is what I call a silent ministry," he said. "And we perform other acts of God's love that others don't know."

The congregation's willingness to open its building has touched numerous strangers. Most they never meet. However, many sign the guest book, leaving addresses from all over the globe.

The role the church plays is more a spiritual thing than religious, Phillips thought.

"The Holy Spirit moves in strange ways," he said. If visitors happen to be there on Sundays, they are welcome to attend the service. But it's not mandatory.

"We've had very little abuse over the years," Hartman said.

There are tons of stories, Phillips said.

Once, a cyclist had to stay a week at the church because he broke the frame of his bike. After completing every "honey-do" the church ladies could think of, he went to the unemployment line and found a couple of days' work to stay busy.

Another time, the church was planning a baby shower and a cyclist's clothes were scattered around the fellowship hall. Quickly, they were moved behind a curtain.

"There is uniqueness about the riders. They are all terrifically different, yet they have one common denominator. They are all self-reliant; consequentially they will deal with anything."

Such as rain, Kansas winds, searing heat, hills, mountains - all that and more as they ride across the country.

"They teach us," Phillips said.

Grace from Beyond the Grave: The Wisdom of Tony Snow

This evening a friend shared with me a marvelous, moving article written by former White House press secretary Tony Snow, who died earlier today of cancer. I had no idea he was a man of such strong faith and that he wrote the article below almost exactly a year ago.

Because I think it's so good, I've reprinted it in full, from the Christianity Today website (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/july/25.30.html?start=1). I hope you'll find it as moving and helpful as I have. Somehow, coming from a man with terminal cancer, it has an integrity and authority that other such messages, written by healthier people, tend to lack. Please feel free to forward this link to anyone else who might benefit.

Cancer's Unexpected Blessings
When you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change.

Commentator and broadcaster Tony Snow announced that he had colon cancer in 2005. Following surgery and chemo-therapy, Snow joined the Bush administration in April 2006 as press secretary. Unfortunately, on March 23 Snow, 51, a husband and father of three, announced that the cancer had recurred, with tumors found in his abdomen—leading to surgery in April, followed by more chemotherapy. Snow went back to work in the White House Briefing Room on May 30, but resigned August 31. CT asked Snow what spiritual lessons he has been learning through the ordeal.

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages—in my case, cancer.

Those of us with potentially fatal diseases—and there are millions in America today—find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence What It All Means, Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life—and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many nonbelieving hearts—an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live—fully, richly, exuberantly—no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see—but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension—and yet don't. By his love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

'You Have Been Called'

Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet; a loved one holds your hand at the side. "It's cancer," the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. "Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler." But another voice whispers: "You have been called." Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter—and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our "normal time."

There's another kind of response, although usually short-lived—an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tinny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing though the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There's nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue—for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us—that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God's love for others. Sickness gets us partway there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two people's worries and fears.

Learning How to Live

Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God's arms not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend's bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was a humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. "I'm going to try to beat [this cancer]," he told me several months before he died. "But if I don't, I'll see you on the other side."

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity—filled with life and love we cannot comprehend—and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don't matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, he throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it.

It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up—to speak of us!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place—in the hollow of God's hand.