When I was a kid, I was the last one in my neighborhood to learn to ride a bike. It didn’t help that my first bike was about four inches too tall for me. And it really didn’t help that kids half my age could ride, while I kept falling. My best friend, Lisa, labored long, running behind me and holding the bike steady while I got going. Without telling me, she’d let go, and I’d make it a few feet, but then I’d look down at the pavement and see the shadow of my bike pulling away from her shadow, and I’d teeter and fall. Again.

One day, Erica, another girl who was about a year older than I was told me all about how hard it had been for her to learn to ride. She said she had kept falling and falling, just like I had. The next day, I got on my bike and was perfectly steady. I actually wore my friends out making them ride all around our trailer park with me. Hearing about somebody else’s struggles had been the key to my success.

At a women’s retreat I recently attended, one of the speakers gave a great analogy for how God views us and our struggles and failures. She said that, as parents, when we are trying to teach our kids to ride their bikes, we do not become angry with them when they fall. We dust them off, encourage them to get back on and keep trying.
God is like that. He’s the perfect father, and even though He knows that His kids will inevitably fall as they strive to walk in His ways, He’s always right there to dust us off and help us get going again in the right direction.

Perhaps you keep “falling off your bike” in the same place or the same way. God’s not going to disown you if you go to Him for comfort and help. None of us likes to admit our failure, but just maybe there is somebody else who needs to hear about how you’ve fallen off your bike in order to find the confidence to get back on their own and ride like the wind.