When I was a kid I rode my bike everywhere. I was all over the neighborhood, sometimes I’d go outside my neighborhood, and sometimes it felt like I went miles without being more than a few hundred yards from where I started.
One day I swung by the house of some friends of mine, but they weren’t home. Suddenly finding myself with an unexpected chunk of free time on my hands, I looked around, hoping to get an idea for what I should do next. The house had kind of a cool porch that was pretty long and narrow, and the end of it dropped off probably about a foot and a half down to their driveway. Sitting there on your bike while waiting for someone that’s not coming to answer the doorbell gives you time to come up with bad ideas.
I didn’t really have any experience doing tricks on my bike, but I thought it would be cool to ride my bike off the edge of the porch and down onto the driveway. This was probably in the late 80s or early 90s, when you started seeing more “extreme” commercials…probably for Mountain Dew or something. BMX was starting to be on TV and in movies a bit more, and those guys could do some pretty cool jumps with their bikes. My morning was wide open, and nobody was going to come out of the house and tell me not to do it. What better time than now?
I visualized it in my head a few times, but probably in slow motion, which came back to bite me in the end. “Ride down the porch, and when you come up to the edge, just keep going.” I imagined myself flying off the porch and landing perfectly on two wheels, then hitting the brakes and skidding into a cool turning stop. And in my mind, that’s when everybody in a nearby house would suddenly look out their window, come out the front door, or drive around the corner to see my amazing stunt, then call my house and tell my Mom or Dad just how cool it was to see me do it. It made sense to me, and now all I needed to do was to give it a try.
I lined up and started slowly pedaling toward the end of the porch. I was a little anxious, but excited that I was about to do something so epic! I pedaled, still slowly, and came up to the edge. Then the reality of physics and gravity taught me a mean lesson: they don’t always work the way I want them to. If the back tire of a bicycle is supported, but the front one isn’t, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what’s going to happen. My front wheel dropped out from under me, and my body got in a fight with the ground. Bloodied up a little, I looked around in every nearby window, front door, and the curve in the road to check for witnesses. Hopefully no phone calls home would be happening after this.
This trick didn’t work for the simple reason that I failed to commit. I didn’t know that it wouldn’t work if I was going slow…it would only work if I was going fast. Intentionally pedaling fast off the edge of a porch takes a certain level of commitment. If I had known that, I don’t know if I would’ve tried it, but a jump like that is only going to work if you can overcome being timid and can build up enough speed to have both wheels leave the edge at nearly the same time. I tried the trick, but because ultimately I wasn’t fully committed, I ended up getting hurt more than I would have if I were totally dedicated to doing it.
If you feel God nudging you toward a certain path, being partially committed might only get you hurt. Pull out all the stops, jump in with both feet, use up the full nine yards, and any other cliché that it takes to convince you to give everything you’ve got to the effort you know He wants you to pursue. Partial effort can easily translate to complete failure.
If you’re coming off a failure, don’t let that stop you from trying again. A lot of times it’s easy to give a half-hearted effort, and then when you fail, you point to that failure and say “see what happened last time? I’m not trying that again!” That’s failing on purpose.
You’ve got the benefit of experience now, and hopefully you learned something about what to do differently this time. If it’s something you’re supposed to do, give it another shot. As long as it’s something God’s pushing you to do, I like your chances of success.