Wet pants, bikers, and Jesus

So there's nothing really as awakening and invigorating as walking out of your favorite coffee shop where you've been diligently working for the past 5 hours, totally oblivious to the outside world, to discover it's raining... and you're on a motorcycle.

And because your bike is 35 years old the lights didn't turn off when you took the key out, so your battery is dead.

And after jumping up and down on the starter for what feels like eternity as half of Lancaster passes on their way home, your tan khakis are a little shade darker and tighter then when walking out.

That was my evening, and with a super soaked crotch I laughed as I headed home for a date with my smoking wife, and I was laughing at how we'd soon be laughing about this.

But, on the way through the city another biker rode next to me. Not just any biker, a "biker" biker.

He looked like he had killed several cows for the amount of leather he had on, and like he may have actually killed a few men as well in the process. I looked like I had bubble wrap around me from all the protective gear I was wearing.

He was the embodiment of every biker gang member Hollywood ever created. I was a pastor with a laptop bag.

His bike had chrome in places I didn't know chrome could go.  My bike was dripping oil out of places I didn't know oil reached, making me look like a rolling fog machine.

As we made eye contact he throttled the engine and it sounded like a crash of rhinoceroses bursting onto Orange St. I tapped my throttle & it whistled like I was calling Lassie home for dinner.  I started wishing my muffler would fall off again to give me that throaty "I've got testosterone to spare" sound again, but it didn't.

So there we were two polar opposites looking at each other. Him on his new Harley, me on my ancient Kawasaki.

And he did that thing that I've never understood, he nodded and gave me the "biker wave," that iconic two finger flip just below the handlebar. And turned left onto Prince St., as I went straight towards home.

We more than likely have nothing in common, but because we were both on bikes, we were equals.

I find Jesus to be like that.

A few months ago as our church celebrated hundreds of stories of folks whose lives were being changed by Jesus, I remembered listening to one lady share about finding Jesus in a homeless shelter and working to prove herself capable of getting her kids back, followed by a lady working as a CEO of a wealthy business figuring out how to give away what she had been given.

Extreme polar opposites, but equals, peers, friends because of Jesus.

That's what motorcycles do, that's what Jesus does.