Relationships Renewed

Matthew 4:4, 2 Tim 2:15

I have a close friend. I moved into my first shred town and met him a few weeks in. He was sponsored. I wasn’t. He loved Jesus. I did too. I thought he was pretty rad. Over years of hanging out and shredding and doing work with SFC together, we had the opportunity to travel overseas as part of a 7-man team.

I was put in charge of these trips managing a group of riders, a small film crew and the continuing relationships with the locals. He and I were both young, brazen, leader-types and so it quickly became clear that we didn’t always see eye to eye on how the trips were run and the sort of business we should go about while traveling. With “too many kooks in the kitchen,” we often challenged each other and butted heads, but we always came back to a place of general camaraderie. Like many of us in working relationships with coworkers of conflicting personalities, we “had to” work through it. We were Christians, after all.

Some years later, he moved away to a different shred town halfway across the country. We kept infrequent communication until one day when a mutual friend invited us both on the trip of a lifetime heli-shredding in Canada. He and I were to rendezvous Stateside and make the long drive together, meeting our friends in B.C.. It had been a long time since we had hung out, and immediately all of those memories of butting heads and travel tensions came flooding back to me.

I had no idea what to expect for the 8-hour car ride, but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. I jokingly prayed, “Lord, help us to AT LEAST be civil,” and then the one-sentence prayer took a serious turn, “And as is your custom, Lord, challenge me.”

For the first fifteen minutes of the car ride we talked about old friends and where life had brought us in the past few years. Then for over 7 hours, we talked about what God was teaching us and how amazing the Word of God is. He had been studying the Word every day with some of his new friends and it was really challenging to me and at the same time energizing and invigorating.

We were hooting and high-fiving and fist-pumping at several points in the conversation. I have never in all my long years of traveling had such an amazing, challenging and encouraging time on the road. We were just two goofy shred bums talking about the Bible and how it was affecting our lives. We were on the trip of a lifetime and even though we had been worrying and fantasizing about the heli-shredding part of it for months, the one thing that now had us so excited wasn’t the trip, it was the power of the living Word of the Creator of the Universe!

I knew it was going to be a life-changing trip, but I had no idea that God was going to use a car ride that I was NOT looking forward to as the place where He would challenge and recharge me the most.

That trip instilled in me a couple of things that have changed my life forever: 1. a new, daily hunger for the Word of God, 2. a respect for brotherly relationships founded on faith despite our clashing personalities, 3. a realization of the importance of accountability to one another and 4. an appreciation for the way God answers our prayers in ways we could’ve never seen coming.

By Joshua Stock | Copper, Colorado