June 05, 2010

Get a Bike…

Written By Cary Schmidt

If you and your family haven’t gotten into taking bike rides yet, be sure to get it done before your kids get too big! I confess—I waited too long.

A few years ago I bought myself a bike and had a grand vision of getting all five of us cruising around Lancaster’s “beautiful” east side on calm summer nights. A few weeks later, Lance took my new bike for a ride from which it would not recover for several years. He inadvertently flattened both tires in a patch of thorns. Sadly, I never got around to fixing the tires, which meant the family bike dream was dead.

But last week we caught the vision again. On Memorial Day, Larry and I dug two rusty, broken bikes out from the side of the house. Then I made a trip to Walmart to pick out a bike for Mom, one for Larry, and to get parts for the repair job on the other two. One hour, four inner tubes, and two seats later we had five functioning bikes and a couple hours of great family adventure just ahead. It was awesome.

I’ve told Dana a dozen times, I don’t know why I waited so long to fix those tires. With as much fun as we’ve had this week, I sure wish I had done it sooner.

And since then I’ve been taking a bit of an inventory. What else am I putting off? Is there anything else in life that something as simple as a flat tire is preventing me from getting done? How many other big results are waiting on the overcoming of some petty road block?

I don’t want little obstacles to thwart big results—in any area of life.