How this biker found God.

Bit of a silly headline that! First of all it reads as if God has gone missing and needs to be found and secondly, it was this biker coming off his bike who started looking.

I had been bike mad since my early teens and considered myself a competent biker long before I was legally entitled to ride one (on the roads that is). It was 1965, whilst you did need to have a licence (and I hadn’t), you didn’t need to wear a crash helmet and protective clothing was positively whimpish!

My friend, who had never ridden a motorbike bought a BSA C15 which needed a bit of work, all it needed was the magneto sorting and once done it revved into life on the stand in the back yard. The open road beckoned and wearing nothing but jeans, T- shirts and light canvas boots, we set off on the warm spring afternoon. A quick lesson from me and, being his bike he set of riding it, with me pillion shouting instructions from the back seat.

We managed to get up to 50mph in no time, doing a number of overtakes in the process, till we approached a sharp left hand bend. As we approached he got a little confused between the brake and clutch lever, so much so, we had neither wheel nor engine braking. On the apex of the bend I knew we wouldn’t make it and for the first time in my life I felt fear, real fear. Not the fear of death, I’d got over that one years before, not the fear of injury, again, I bore many scars from much torn flesh. The fear was one of waste. At 17 years of age, in those fleeting seconds, I could see what I had considered to be a full exciting life about to be extinguished and nothing to show for it. I thought, ‘there has to be more to life than this’, and let out a cry, ‘Oh God don’t let it end like this’

The fact that I can write these words means it didn’t end that day, or should I say, something did end that day, but also something began. Semi conscious I was carried into a shop near to the point of collision with the breakdown truck that just happened to stop our forward progress. Not only was I alive, but I was also uninjured, apart from a little graze on my hip where my exposed flesh met the tarmac. My friend wasn’t as fortunate, although he too was alive; but was severely injured with numerous broken bones, including his pelvis.

That night in the hospital I had time to reflect on the day’s events, especially my plea for a second chance. It’s worth noting here that I had no understanding of religion and what I had seen of this Christian God didn’t entice me. I was an atheist, who was the son of an atheist. My dad, whom I greatly admired, had drilled into me from an early age the nonsense and futility of religion, especially Christianity. However, after what I’d experienced, I knew there had to be something. I looked at Mysticism, after all the Beatles were into Transcendental Meditation. So I looked at everything, including Zen Buddhism and found myself still searching.

I was now 18 and had started to be ‘sensible’, I went to night school to try and catch up my wasted education. I was trying to be more and more reflective, but still with a fiery, rebellious streak. Maybe a girlfriend would help, so I started seeing this girl who had a little something about her. She went to church. She knew what a crazy kind of guy I was (maybe that was the attraction?) and was afraid to invite me to her church. Even stranger was the fact that the more she didn’t want me to go, the more I did…still the rebel after all. So I went.

I had been insulted by the best, and thrown a few insults back myself, but the preacher at this little mission church, with less that 15 people, really upset me. ‘How dare he’, I thought, ‘He doesn’t know me; he knows nothing about me and yet he can say such a thing’. I just wanted to get out of that place and never come back.

He said, as if he was talking directly to me, ‘God loves you so much that He let His Son die on a cross, just for you’. My immediate reaction was, ‘Nobody could love anybody that much. Such a love cannot exist, and if it did, then I, with all my faults and failures could never have it.’

For weeks I tried to put this out of my mind. I did my best to prove I could sin with the rest, but something had got in and I just never enjoyed it like before. The very thing I was searching for was now the very thing I was running away from and I was getting more and more miserable the more I tried to suppress it.

Then it happened. One day whilst walking to work, I could stand it no more. On the pavement, half way down the lane where I worked, I said simply, ‘God if you are real, and that love the man was talking about is real, then I want it’. Within seconds of the words leaving my lips, the darkness and heaviness started to lift and a light and warmth started to fill my very being. That was over 40 years ago, the light and the warmth are still there. They have sometimes glowed with an intensity that could never be described, and sometimes stilled in reflective pools of peace, but they have never left.

That girl became my wife, and the early days of our courtship were spent (legally) travelling far and wide on my motorbike. One of these new fangled 4 stroke Japanese imports called ‘Honda’.

I’d like to say, this biker found God, but the truth of it is, He found me.