posted 8/26/2025
Mike Schaffer, one of the co-founders of Biking for Babies, led this year’s Alumni “Ride, Retreat, and Reunion.” Pulling together missionaries from all different years and stages of Biking for Babies’ organizational growth, the group rode 337 miles from Tennessee to St. Louis, MO in July.
Their solidarity with the 2025 missionaries showed their continued support of Biking for Babies’ mission, as well as their continued growth as missionary disciples.
Mike shared this reflection after this inaugural alumni offering.
As the Divine Suitor in Biking for Babies, He’s stood patiently at the end of books, century rides, a friendly invitation, or Eucharistic Benediction, drawing us in until we gratefully realize we’ve gone so far down a path of His own making that we might never have had the courage to start it had we known what was in store.
And I think our capacity to change and live in the spiritual weather of these unplanned pilgrimages has surprised me the most about Biking for Babies over the last 16 years.
On the Alumni Ride & Retreat, I think retreading, or ‘rebicycling’(!) a lot of those paths from years before with new friends and old, hearing how some of the alumni’s hearts have changed and grown in the years since their National Ride participation, and spending a couple of days again under Jimmy Becker’s legendary(!) spiritual umbrella coalesced for me the transformative breadth of Biking for Babies.
And that’s significant because while answering ‘yes’ to a child in the practical sense, is a binary one, saying ‘yes’ to life in a manner that endures and permeates necessitates the transformation of a genuine pilgrim. There is a rather dramatic way in which the missionaries’ ride necessarily demands frequently radical, practical decisions that can reconfigure our internal architecture with structures built of courage, empathy, endurance, and conscientiousness.
I overheard one conversation in particular at the Celebration of Life that a missionary from the National Ride had with a gas station employee who became aware of the cause for which he was riding. “Do you believe in forced-births?” she asked. “I wouldn’t put it that way,” he charitably replied. Rather, he explained the rhythmic ‘yes’ that a consistent life ethic necessitates toward any marginalized person—whether it’s the unborn, women, the poor, and immigrants, in particular.
Our modern digital landscape, where near all of us spend far too much time, can atrophy our moral muscles. Consider the courage and charity demanded by the young man and the gas station employee compared to the frequently one upmanship we all encounter or even contribute to on a near-daily basis online. In that way, the world has maybe changed the most since my first Biking for Babies in 2009. There really is a greater necessity for the ride because the physical world—where one’s heart and eyes actually have to see the heart and eyes of another—has been only increasingly traded for the digital one of virtue-signaling and denigating social media posts by our political leaders and the everyman and everywoman.
Further, time unfolds with not only the Lord’s grace, but also illness, tragedy, loss, and uncertainty. As such, faith can frequently be conceived as something naïve and untested when it wilts under these ubiquitous companions of life.
And time has unfolded for the six riders and one support crew who participated in the first ever BARRR—from Dyersburg, Tennessee to Manchester, Missouri over two days. It was 250 miles of riding—flat the first day, hilly the second, and a thousand degrees for both. Some highlights included Father Patrick’s steaks on Thursday night, picking Christine Kania up from the train station just two hours before the ride began, Christina Woodman’s retreat talk on Friday, leaving Missouri to ride through Illinois for four hours then reentering in Saint Louis over an eight-lane interstate, the generosity of county and city officers in Dyers county, Caruthersville, Columbia, and South County who escorted us down several highway segments for safety, and welcoming the 2025 class of the Saint Louis National Ride missionaries to the finish.
The ride and retreat were precisely that renewal of that vision, within the physical, heart-to-heart world, that I’d hoped and prayed for. We can’t undo our hurts that wound us, but we can continue looking ahead, as pilgrims, to the goodness that God promises us (Romans 8:28). The Biking for Babies Alumni Ride and Retreat was a beautiful reminder of the role that friendship, prayer, and doing hard things for people you love has in keeping that vision good, true, and faithful. We may not have ridden as far as we once did or as fast, but we kept our eyes and hearts oriented toward that spiritual horizon together.
You can find similar impact stories throughout our blog.
