If you go mountain biking, you are going to fall.  It’s just part of it.  Whether hitting roots or missing a landing or getting spooked by a seesaw, you’re going to fall.  When I took my boys riding, the inevitable scrapes and bruises I called “souvenirs,” partly to have them not be overcome by the injuries, but also to normalize the reality.  Whether that was a good thing or not, I don’t know; our younger son sure got some “souvenirs” a couple of years ago.  He lost 2 months of work for the privilege of displaying those.

Last week, it was my turn.  I was riding a mountain bike, but was riding primarily the El Rio Trail, when on the way back, I cut through the back of one of the parking lots at Boca Regional and tried to ram through a long hedge.  Some hedges, low to the ground, you can jump or push through.  Some may resist, but you can bend them.  This bamboo hedge wasn’t quite so compliant, however, and demanded that my right handlebar stay on one side of the hedge and let the other through.  This meant my bike went to the right, and I kept going straight, which sans bicycle, I (with Buzz Lightyear) would like to call it “falling with style” but truthfully it was an ugly example of what Woodie would have called just falling.  Last Sunday, some of you saw the scrapes on my hands as proof of the ugliness.

“Fall” and “ugliness” fit together.  Occasionally somebody will fall with some modicum of grace, but usually a fall ain’t pretty.  Maybe that’s why Christians call the sin that Adam and Eve first committed “the Fall.”  It was ugly.  And yes, like me on my fall, the linear trajectory was downward.  Shel Silverstein notwithstanding, all falls go down.  Adam and Eve’s sin lowered their standing, from a righteous conversational relationship with God to a disobedient distance.  From upstanding innocence to a guilty splat.  From living as eternal beings to the condemnation of being temporal ones.  It was definitely “the” fall, not just “a” fall like the one I took on my bike.

And not unlike the scrapes and bruises that I carry right now, they did not emerge unscathed from their fall.  The wounds of “by the sweat of thy brow,” and the pain of childbearing hurt, but nothing like the deep cut that now separated a perfect God from sinful human beings.

The cuts that I have on my hands and limbs are starting to scab — the first signs of healing.  At some point, one or two of them will not disappear completely, but will become scars, not painful, not a health concern, but a mark of how deep the cuts were.  For Adam and Eve’s fall, it would be a long time till Jesus came, received the bruises Himself, bringing for us the wonderful truth that St. Peter shared: “by His wounds we are healed.”  You and I, because of Jesus, can look at our own sins, our own mortality, and see them not as wounds anymore, but as scars, the healed-by-Jesus wounds that our own falls created.

Sin leaves scars.  A missionary once told me that sin is like a nail that is pounded into a tree.  You can take the nail out, the sin can be forgiven, but there will be a wound left in the tree.  That missionary used that illustration to encourage me to avoid sin altogether.  It was an effective illustration.  What I have learned about wounds becoming scars is that the reminder may stay, but with Jesus’ forgiveness, the scars don’t have to hurt.  We can just look at them and learn.

Which maybe I have to do about bike riding!

Back home,

Craig

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins,

He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:8-9 (NIV)