Well, hi there. Yes, I know it’s been a while. While there have been a couple of times when I sat down to begin writing something here, I never did get around to putting my thoughts down. Suddenly, it’s been a few weeks, and I haven’t shared anything.
Now, I have all kinds of thoughts to share with you. However, two of the things I’ve been up to seem to fit together, so let me share them with you and throw out a thought about them. One has to do with my bike, the other is about digging holes.
So, first my bike. I love my 94 Dyna WideGlide. Sure it has over 206,000 KMS on it. Sure, the frame is in need of some paint. But, it’s a beautiful bike. It had a “cool factor” long before my good friend Jason from HellCat Customs painted it this past winter. But that paint job raised the “awesomeness” of the bike more than a few notches.
Still, I think I’m getting old. This may be my last summer on the Dyna. I’m pretty sure I am ready to look into a “Geezer-Glide”. Heather’s complaining that she’s constantly having to clean my drool off of her ’02 Electra-Glide. I wont lie, I love riding her bike. I think I want one.
But, for now, I’m still on my Dyna. When it’s running right. Not that it’s been misbehaving, it just needed a little care. So, a month ago, I pulled out the wiring harness and, with the help of a friend, rewired most of the bike. I was good to go.
Except I wasn’t good to go.
The bike has continued to be finicky. Some mornings, it fights with me to start. In the past, this bike fired up first attempt. This year, there have been days when I wondered if it was going to start at all.
Then, in the past week, it’s started to hesitate, backfire, chug along at low speed. It seemed like it was starving for fuel. Last Thursday, I barely got to church on it. I was frustrated. In the past year, almost every aspect of the electrical had been replaced (stator, regulator, coil, plug wires, etc).
So, on Saturday, I pulled the float bowl. Sure enough, there was dirt. Lots of crap. That meant, pulling the tank and inspecting the inline fuel filter on my Pingle petcock. What I found was incredible. To suggest there was rust in the tank would be … well, an understatement. And so, I spent the weekend cleaning the tank, the carb, and even the fuel lines themselves.
Yesterday, I finally got it all back together and took it for a spin. I was so excited to finally get it out and running right. Except two blocks later, it was back to sputtering. I headed home, checked the bowl again. More dirt. It took three attempts before I cleaned out all of the crap. And then, because the bike had been starving for fuel before, I needed to adjust the settings on my S&S Super E. Finally, around 7:30 last night, I took the bike out and she ran like she was brand new. What a beautiful ride it was.
While I was doing that, my buddy, who happens to own his own home renovation business (and who is currently building this bike), was digging holes in my backyard. Actually, he was digging holes in the backyards of about six of my neighbours. You see, he’s replacing all the fences. At first glance, it looked like the holes were going to be fairly easy to dig. But, a foot or two down, he ran into rock. Lots of rock. An easy job suddenly began a very difficult one.
So, what do these stories have in common? Well, sometimes we let things go and before you know it, the dirt inside begins to affect how we live. It clogs our sense of compassion, our love for family, and our sense of purpose. Often it happens slowly. We can sense something’s just not right, but we struggle with figuring out what that something is.
If we rely only on other people to determine what might be wrong, we could be fooled into a false sense of security. You see, sometimes, all others see is the exterior. To them, everything looks fine, and they may even tell you that. But they don’t see the rock that is beneath the soil. They don’t realize that things are not as good below the surface.
Here’s the thing. God does. God sees the rocks, he knows there is dirt in the tank, he can even let you know when the carb needs a little tuning. The question is: have you asked him? Have you invited God to take inventory of your life and help you see what might be wrong inside?
David, who was once king of Israel, wrote a song that is found in Psalm 139:23-24. In it he wrote these words: Search me, O God and know my heart.
Perhaps those are good words to pray. I know I need to.