Spinning My Wheels

            Lately I have been spending a good deal of time spinning my wheels.

            Literally. Perhaps it is because I have been sensing the approach of middle age (pause here for a chuckle at my expense), or because I have been taking more seriously the groans emitted from the bathroom scale of late, or because I have finally been convinced that it is a good thing to do, but, whatever the reason, I have started up a new exercise regime. And with the weather being so brutal out of doors, and thus keeping me off my bike, I have taken to the indoor world of “spinning.”

            “Spinning” has nothing to do with Sleeping Beauty and spindles – spinning is step aerobics on wheels, it is a bunch of folk chained to stationary bikes in an overheated room for an hour, pedaling away while a perky trainer with thighs like Lance Armstrong and a voice of a Marine yells out instructions like “Pedal harder!” and “60 seconds in the standing position”, and, “Move it, you maggots!” (well, maybe not that one).  We don’t get anywhere, being on a stationary bike….

            I sometimes think that’s why God gave us Easter. In a recent comic in the Globe, there is a picture of an angel standing on a cloud looking down at earth, with the caption being, “The world and the way it would be if the master of the universe was my mother”. And then there is a voice coming from the cloud saying, “Don’t make me come down there!”

            Well, that is actually what did happen. Because we were so busy spinning our wheels, trying like the dickens to get to God but for all our efforts getting only in our way, God did come down there. And while that made a lot us mad enough to run God out of town and hang God on a tree, God was not done, and God was not going to let human sin and death stand in the way.

           

            Hence, Easter, hence, resurrection, hence a chance to get off the stationary bike and saddle up a tandem where we are all in backseats and Jesus is in the driver’s seat and together there is no mountain we cannot climb, no task we cannot take on, no “thing” to fear.

            Onward, or, as they say in the Tour de France, “Allez!”