With the holiday season around the corner, plans of traveling to and from relatives’ houses are in motion for most across the country. Biking for Babies Executive Team Members started their “family” travels a little earlier as the team met in Muscatine, IA this past October to reflect on this past year’s pilgrimage and plan for our 2020 pilgrimage. If you have family members that you do not see often, you know the routine: a lot of hugs, a lot of laughs, a lot of discussions, no sleep, and leaving feeling like you could’ve spent a whole week with those people. It was no different for the Executive Team as we spent our first meal together reminiscing on stories, trials, and triumphs of past rides dating all the way back to 2009. Just like any family, there are so many core similarities within the Executive Team members, but so many varying personalities, hobbies, stages of life, and passions. You have a businessman, a healthcare provider, an engineer, a youth minister, an accountant, and an executive director with a human resources background. Only in a family would all those different personality types work!
And when our team gets together, I can’t help but think of the verse from 1 Corinthians: “There is one body, but many parts.” Though we are different, we all have one goal in mind: to make Christ the center of our life and the center of Biking for Babies mission. Each member took a turn during the weekend to share their reflection on a certain Bible verse. Five unique reflections, five unique perspectives, all centered on our Lord. Though our goals were to talk about the organization, we all realized and took seriously the fact that we can only do good if we continue to draw ourselves closer to Christ so that He may do good through us. As a former long-time missionary, this sentiment does not stay at the level of the Executive Team but penetrates throughout the entire organization. Each route and its members should act and feel like a Christian family. They should pray together, challenge each other, encourage each other, and sacrifice for each other every day during the ride. It is this Christian family model that makes it possible for each missionary to cross the finish line in St. Louis every year. They not only finish, but they finish with joy, inside jokes, stories, and all the little nuances of a familial relationship. It is this process of becoming a family and this joy of struggling with one another that we hope our Executive Team and missionaries bring back to their communities to positively impact them. If you are a donor, you are family; if you are a Pregnancy Resource Center we support, you are family; if you follow us on social media, guess what, you are family! The heart of the pro-life movement is to create actual and communal families that offer support in the toughest of life’s trials, and each year at Biking for Babies that example starts with our Executive Team.
With God’s grace and all of your support, our “family” is growing (and no, I am NOT announcing a pregnancy). We will have new individuals with new roles within the organization this year in hopes to streamline our formation and communication with our missionaries. We have new goals and new supporting members of our Executive Team. And as our family grows, we pray that our impact continues to grow.
