Personal Proof of God’s Omnipotence

This is a true story of the time God answered my prayer twenty years before I asked.  It is not a story of a life-changing event or even a particularly fervent prayer.  It won’t make anyone cry.  It’s about the simple reminder I received that God is always paying attention to us even when we aren’t necessarily paying attention to him.

Three of my kids decided at the same time that I had failed in an important parenting task.  Two of the kids were twelve, the other was fifteen, and they’d somehow gotten that old without knowing how to ride a bike.  I didn’t know right away how to rectify this shortcoming.  All of them were too big for the only bike we owned at the time.  Part of the reason I hadn’t taught them was because we live in a hilly neighborhood, which is not a good place to learn.  I told them I’d give it some thought.  Yes, this was partly to see how serious they were.

Fortunately, we visited my parents in another state a short time later.  They live on a very flat dead-end street, which is possibly the best place to learn to ride a bike.  My dad also keeps a bunch of old bikes in his garage.  We got enough of them working that all three of the kids were riding up and down the street within an hour.  Problem solved.

I got off easy on the first half.  But once the kids knew how to ride bikes, they insisted they needed bikes to ride.  I still wondered if the novelty would wear off right away so I wanted to find some used bikes.  I thought this would save money and be fairly green.  I know from my dad that bikes regularly outlive their first owners.  The twelve-year-olds got new-to-them bikes with only a bit of hunting.  But the fifteen-year-old needed an adult-sized bike.  I’m guessing it’s because people don’t outgrow those that they are a bit harder to find used.  The only ones I found were rather high-end and cost more than some new ones. 

This is the point in the story where I finally turned to God.  I reach out to him for the big decisions all the time.  I usually figure I can handle the smaller ones.  But I think God likes to be involved in everything.  I prayed that night about whether I should keep looking for a used bike or get the child growing impatient to join her siblings on wheels something new.  Shortly after I got up the next morning, my husband came up to me and said, “Did I dream this, or did someone once tell us there was a bike in the crawl space under our house?”

Once my memory was jogged, I knew exactly what he was talking about.  The first summer we owned our house, which was about twenty years previous, we needed an exterminator to tackle an ant problem.  The guy asked us if we knew there was a bike under the house.  We did not.  It must have been left by the previous owners.  Since we had no use for a bike at the time and no way to contact the previous owners to try to return it, we shrugged it off and immediately forgot. 

Now that we had a child in want of a bike, we crawled under the house to retrieve whatever was under there.  I should clarify that when I say “we” here, I mean my husband crawled under the house because ew.  Then we cleaned it up, which was actually a joint effort.  The bike worked just fine.  In fact, this happened several years ago, and it’s still working fine.  It’s still getting occasional use.  And yes, everyone here still calls it “the crawl space bike.”