Rehab

Tonight I am in rehab. After a 74 mile day, we arrived at Isaiah House, a faith-based rehab facility, in Willisburg KY.

We started off the morning with Kifu coffee and McDonalds breakfast. Our meal choices were highly influenced by Monopoly. Thankfully, the requirements for biking fuel are calories, a hard target to miss at the Golden Arches. We reviewed our route while my Asbury biking kit that Trent Ellsworth let me have received some negative attention. I guess it is all I could hope for with a  purple, spandex assemble. 

The day was über pretty. We road mostly on back roads, a huge contrast to our “north on 27” route yesterday. We got to see the beauty of Kentucky: its red leaves, its smiling people, its rolling hills (the beauty of which were only visually enjoyed). Among all of this beauty there was super-craziness as well. We almost adopted a dog. He approached us while we stopped to eat some junk. He was really friendly. He enjoyed our company too, as evidenced by his running after us for a mile and a half. 

About forty miles into the ride, Jeremy and I began constructing highly improbable situations that would make awesome stories later. One was having a squirrel jumping into the spokes of our tires and beheading itself. Morbid? Yes. Improbable? You tell me, after I tell you this. About ten miles outside of Willisburg, we watched a squirrel run head first into a fence. He then ran, dazed and confused, into Jeremy’s front tire. It did not behead itself, but honestly, did it have too? It is still a pretty cool story. I, being terribly unobservant, lost every county line race today, and am predicting that I will do the same tomorrow.

The odometer read 74 miles when we arrived at the Isaiah House, nine miles longer than what we were expecting to ride today. However, yesterday was cut a bit short with all of the construction, so it all evens out. We were all super tired. 

Dinner was chicken and dumplings. During dinner one of my neighbors from my childhood recognized me, and  we caught up. It was super awesome. After dinner, we were told church would start in about thirty minutes. We arrived and it was unlike any service I had ever been to. It consisted two testimonies and a few worship songs, one written and played by my old neighbor. Both of  the testimony givers had been fully captured by drugs when they came to the Isaiah House. They were extremely resistant when the first got their and God helped soften their hearts and mold them into new followers of him. 

The largest obstacle I have had to overcome in my faith is self-pity. I still struggle with it now, but not as often as I used to. I would often hear testimonies like these and resent the fact that I grew up in a Christian home, and contemplate denouncing my faith  so I could just have a story to tell. I basically thought my life was hard because it was so easy. I never had true hardship like these people, and all “hardship” that I had encountered could be dissolved by dismissing it as petty. However, God has recently given me a great community within my school and within my church to ween me off of this destructive behavior. Tonight when I heard these men speak I did not think to myself, “How unfortunate is it that my testimony is nothing like this?” but “Praise be to God, for these men are and will be of great use for Your will.”