It’s God’s Problem

You cannot change the behavior of others. You can offer incentives, but to change their decisions is not in our hands.

The Covenant of Christ is feudal and tribal. You have some authority over children and other dependents under your dominion, but even then, the issue is restraining them and guiding them to make better choices more consistent with shalom. You cannot decide for them; the whole point is to encourage better decisions, not wiping away decisions you don’t like.

The Covenant recognizes three levels of participation. You have covenant family, folks supposedly committed to your shalom. You have allies who aren’t committed to your welfare, but are willing to work alongside for their own reasons. You have folks who are enemies, hostile to your shalom. This is roughly equivalent to the family, paid servants and slaves/prisoners of the Old Testament feudal household. There is a sort of fourth category of people who simply aren’t involved. In terms of psychology, we refer to them as “human scenery”.

As you might expect, under the Radix Fidem community covenant, we have precious few people in our lives who are covenant family. That’s the reality we live with right now. There is an allowance for people taking refuge in your covenant domain, being treated as provisional family, but even those are precious few. The rest of the world is for us either allies or enemies.

I have a commission from God, and it includes riding my bicycle. Let’s not get bogged down in all the reasons for that; just know that I regard this activity as critical to my obedience to the Lord. The pictures I post here are also a part of that, though of lesser importance. The riding is the big thing. And quite frankly, I pray every day for guidance where the Lord wants me to ride.

Sometimes it’s a surprise, taking me off my standard routes. Often enough, I’ll be urged to make a variation from a regular loop. A critical element in each ride is stopping at some particular place to pray and contemplate the Word. I’ve come up with a list of prayer chapels. This is all very serious business with me. I regard them as divine appointments to pass certain locations.

Right now there’s a lot of construction on some of my routes. There are just three corridors between the Midwest City/Del City (“Mid-Del”) area and the biking routes of Oklahoma City. One is way south — the Grand Boulevard Trail. Another is in the middle — the Eagle Lake Trail. The third is just a bit north of there — NE 4th Street. The last one is being rebuilt so that instead of being an official bike route, it will have an actual bike path.

As with most previous projects all over the Oklahoma City Metro area (over 600 square miles), those involving bike routes have always remained open to cyclists even when motorists were blocked. That is, if I choose to ride on NE 4th Street past the construction crews, they wave and smile, but won’t try to hinder me passing through except for my own safety, and only briefly at that. It’s been like this for years, and for several projects.

There has been for years a connection in the middle route involving Eagle Lake Trail. It connects via some land along the rowing competition area of the Oklahoma River Recreation Area, to the South River Trail. Recently, there has been a lot of landscaping work going on around the connecting trail, because the First Americans Museum (FAM) is adjacent to that trail. The crews completely tore up our trail, though the OKC Parks and Recreation have promised to put it back as soon as the project is finished.

Meanwhile, cyclist were allowed to go through at their own risk — until a couple of weeks ago. Whoever runs the contract for this project has recently erected signs refusing passage, and the workers enforce it.

You can yammer all you like about the differences in the contracts and liabilities, etc., but the point is this move closes off a route cyclists have been using for decades. The city still owns the route, not the FAM. It’s part of the rowing recreation area; it’s how judges get to their posts along the river bank. There is no valid detour for cyclists connecting between the River routes and Eagle Lake, because the contract crews refuse to permit passage on the only land that connects the two routes.

Nobody is going to stand up for the cyclists. The local organizations refuse to even talk about advocacy for us. Apparently there aren’t any cycling lawyers who have reason to pass that way. Yes, I’m sure a few ornery riders have just flipped them the bird and rode through anyway. I’m not one of those. I have a covenant witness to uphold.

Revenge, or forcing them to change their behavior, is not a valid goal in my consideration. Rather, I have only the Lord who commissioned my choice to pass through there. As someone else has explained so well, this is matter of avoiding being defiled by someone who dares to defy my God’s command.

I am forced to take a very rough route around the FAM property, which includes riding on some railroad tracks that aren’t used much. Yes, that’s technically illegal, but it’s also totally unenforced. It’s the only choice I have left; I’m following my convictions. My convictions also warn me to stay away from the buttheads who are hindering my obedience to the Lord. I’ve delivered them and their project over to Satan (1 Timothy 1:18-20; 1 Corinthians 5:4-5). I won’t ride within the boundaries of their project.

Yes, this would appear to be a highly limited way to handle it. Keep in mind that the core issue here is God and whether He takes offense at someone hindering my obedience to His mission for me. I’m in no position to take any other action. Nobody with human legal authority cares. I have no family or allies affected, only enemies and human scenery. But I take this seriously because my convictions were provoked, so I’ll do about the only thing I can.

Just as surely as I pray for and bless those who allow me to ride through their construction projects without comment, I’ll stop and pray at the gate of this offending construction project and renew the vow to turn them over to Satan. I’ll pray very specifically that God will remove whatever covering they might have, and take all their blessings. My faith says it will make a difference to God, and that He will be inclined to grant my prayers.

I may never know what He does about it, but if something is reported, I’ll be sure to pass it on.

Note: If you look this up on a mapping service, it’s Eastern Avenue just south of Interstate 40 in Oklahoma City. Eastern Avenue is dangerous for cyclists due to high volume heavy traffic; that’s why the Eagle Lake Trail ducks under it. If you want to suggest I take Reno Avenue, that’s just as dangerous as Eastern Avenue. If you would like to suggest I take SE 15th Street, that’s a high crime area where I was personally robbed some years ago. I’m not riding there.

For now, I connect using the railroad tracks and a dirt track along Interstate 35 to get between the end of the Eagle Lake Trail and the end of the South River Trail.