Last night, I spent several hours in the apartment of some Eritrean refugees, chewing sorgum, listening to Tigrinya music and helping them with their citizenship class homework ("What is the Star Spangled Banner?"), and I realized the distance I have come along this tradgectory. Six months ago, I did not know where Eritrea was, let alone imagine I would be helping one of its former residents build a bicycle and eat food from his country in his own home. So I may ask myself, well, how did I get here?
When I was 12 years old, my family rented a house to live in for a summer. The landlords cleaned out the garage just before they got there and two bicycles were in the trash heap waiting to be picked up for the dump. (For those of you privy to literary devices, this is Foreshadowing!) I scavanged these bicycles out (also forshadowing for my many dumpster-diving ecapades) and managed to cobble together a single bicycle out of the two. It was a horrible, outdated beast of a BMX bike, but it rolled and that's all I cared about. I had a lot to learn about making a bicycle work, and I learned the hard way.
Fast foward a few years and you can skip middle school and riding around the neighborhood alone every day and trying to learn flatland riding with no outside knowledge of what I was doing. When I was a freshman in high school, my family moved from Wisconsin to Indianapolis. I hated the move, but it turned out that, out of the thousands of students at my high school, three were fellow BMX riders, and they all lived within spitting distance of my new house. There was an empty parking lot across the street from our house where I would spend countless hours riding my bike, alone, with headphones on, and a workbench in the garage where I probably spent even more hours working on and experimenting with my bike. Living in an urban area, unlike my former rural home, allowed me to explore street BMX riding with friends. Riding led me to become a photographer, which led me to college and a short career in Journalism. It also led me to my wife, whom I met when she sent me an IM to ask about bike parts.
In 2007, I got a job at a newspaper and worked there for a year honing my skills in interviewing, writing, and photography. This led to a better paying job editing a magazine, which allowed us to get out of debt quickly. Around that time, Kelly and I started exploring a future in international missions and pined a sign that read "August 2010 or bust" above our computer screen, indicating that we would be somewhere else, living intentionally by that date or we would be homeless. The best thing to happen to me at that job was being laid off. After only six months with a decent salary, a leisurely bus commute into downtown San Antonio, and good benefits, I lost all of it. We persevered to get out of debt and do something meaningful. I spent months agonizing over the lack of a "career" and explored dozens of routes with no success. Metaphoric doors were slammed in my face again and again as I tried careers and jobs. No one wanted to hire me, an honest, college educated, hard-working young man willing to work for peanuts to do just about anything. I always wanted to go back to working at a bike shop but I did not think anyone would hire me or pay me enough to stick with it.
In June 2009, a bike shop did hire me and I spent the subsequent year learning everything I could from some of the best wrenches in San Antonio. A friend who was working there helped me get my foot in the door and I was off! In fact, I learned a lot from the Best Mechanic in the Universe and another who's just a Big Deal.
I had taught myself a lot about fixing my own bike over the years, but most of my knowledge was limited to BMX bikes. With a year (hardly enough to be an expert) of experience under my belt, I was much better prepared for the next phase.
In January of this year, Kelly and I visited South Africa to minister to prisoners, squatter camp dwellers, and school kids for one week, leaving a dear friend behind to continue that work. We decided shortly after returning that we would return to Joburg to continue that work, but every door was slammed in our faces again. It seemed hopeless and unfair that passionate, energetic young people such as ourselves should have such a hard time being sent across the world as missionaries, but no one would budge. We decided to go back to my old standby, bicycles.
We have a notebook with all kinds of notes about pursuits in my life. One page was to be devoted to bicycle-related ministries. There are one or two organizations listed, then "Communicycle, Josh Feit." There are no further entries on that page because shortly after I wrote that, Kelly and I visited Atlanta and decided to move back here in August. So here we are are. I am back to pulling bikes out of the trash, spending whole days with my hands covered in grease and ground-up chromium molybdenum, instructing people to replace tubes and adjust derailleurs and admonishing them for the use of WD-40 on their bicycles. (WD-40 is not a lubricant! Stop using it on your bikes!)
We might not have ended up in South Africa or Northern Ireland (yet), but all those people from broken parts of the world have come to us, often with their bicycles, and I am able to serve God by serving them (or am I serving them by serving God?) I could not be more content with my situation now, and pray only that I live in such a way that is worthy of this kind of satisfaction.
