"If I'm Worthy of Love Just As I Am, Why %#@*! Do I Have to Change?"

            Last spring during my sabbatical, I decided that I would teach my son how to ride a bicycle without training wheels.

            He was still four, but I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was seven and had a hard time, and my younger siblings, who learned at younger ages on smaller bicycles, seemed to learn more easily.

            I watched several videos on YouTube about how to teach your child to ride a bike. Then, since we live in a hilly neighborhood, I decided the best place for us to practice would be Celebration Park. There was even a place there where he could practice riding on grass in case he fell.

            I threw [my son]’s bike in the back of the van. We got all of his protective gear - - helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and even gloves - - all the protective gear I never had as a child. After parking, I carried his bike a few hundred yards to the field where we were going to practice.

            “Okay,” I said, “let’s try.” I put his bike down on the grass.

            “I’m scared,” he said. “I’ll fall and get hurt.”

            “I’ll catch you,” I said. “Even if you fall, it’s just grass.”

            “I don’t want to now,” he said.

            “We came all the way here so you could do this!” I said.

            “Let’s just go home.”

            “Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to push him too hard.

            The next day, I asked [my son], “Do you want to try riding your bike again at the park?” “Yeah,” he said, “let’s try again.”

            So off we went to the park again.

            “Okay,” I said, “let’s try.”

            “I’m scared,” he said. “I’ll fall and get hurt.”

            “I’ll catch you,” I said. “Even if you fall,” I said, “it’s just grass.”

            “I don’t want to now,” he said.

            “We came all the way here again so you could do this.” I said.

            “Let’s just go home,” he said.

            “If you try, I’ll buy you ice cream,” I said.

            “Okay, I’ll try,” he said.

            Our bike-riding sessions continued like this for days and weeks. Some days, we got to the park, and he wouldn’t ride at all. Some days, he would try riding once. Some days, he would ride several times. There were occasional falls. Not too many, but some. There were occasional tears. He was slowly making progress, but very slowly. It wasn’t easy for either of us.

            I talked with Hiromi. “Maybe we should give up for now. Maybe we should wait until next year when he’s a little older. Maybe he’ll be more ready.  Maybe he’ll be more motivated after he sees all of his friends riding by themselves.”

            Hiromi disagreed. Waiting until children are motivated by themselves is a very American concept, according to my wife, who harbors her own inner Tiger Mother.

            So we kept practicing. Hiromi practiced with him too. We tried not to push him too hard, but the truth is that we pushed. We never yelled, or threatened, or shamed. Instead, we encouraged, we coaxed, we cajoled, and we bribed. .

            Then one day - - it was during the week I was in North Carolina for the Unitarian Univeralist General Assembly - - it happened. [my son] could ride by himself. Hiromi sent me a cellphone video, and I teared up when I watched it.

            Now there is nothing [my son] likes more than going for a bike ride. We often go together taking long rides along the Interurban trail where we see trains, big trucks, horses, and other things five-year-olds like to see.

            I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting about the experience.

            My love for my son is unconditional. It is the most unconditional love I have ever known. I love him and will always love him no matter what. If he had grown up to be an adult who could never ride a bicycle, I still would have loved him. No matter how he succeeds or fails in life, I will still love him. Even if he grows up to be an axe-murderer, or even a Tim Eyeman supporter, I will still love him. There is nothing he can or can’t do that will change that.

            I try to tell him that. Before I put him to bed at night, I tell him, “You’re my favorite little boy in the whole world.” I often tell him, “I love you, and I will always love you, no matter what.”

            So I didn’t want him to ride a bicycle to please me or to make me proud. The last thing I want to be in the world is one of those parents who lives through their children’s accomplishments, who see their children’s success or failure as a reflection of their own worth, though I think even the best of parents sometimes fall into that trap. As the principal at my son’s elementary school said recently, “I really wanted my child to get a good grade on his science project because, you know, I worked really hard on that.”

            Then why did I want him to learn how to ride a bike? Because I thought it would be fun for him! I remember how much more I enjoyed riding a bike after I got rid of my training wheels, and I wanted him to have just as much fun. Because I love my son, and love him unconditionally, I want him to have the most satisfying life possible.

            [My son]’s now very glad that he learned to ride a bike, and he’s proud of himself for doing so. When he talks about learning how to ride, he talks about it being scary at first but that we kept on trying, and one day he could finally do it.

            I hope it’s an experience he remembers because now that he’s started kindergarten, I realize that there a lot more things that he’s going to have to learn in life. My hope is that most of the time, this learning will be fun and fairly easy. But I know it won’t always be. I know he’s going to have to learn how to do some things that will be difficult for him at first, which might even be a little scary at first, and which may take a long time, but which, in the end, help him to have a much better experience of life than he would otherwise.

            One of the things I did on my sabbatical was to teach [my son] how to ride a bike. One of the other things I did during my sabbatical was to try to take better care of myself and try to get into better shape myself. I exercised almost every day. Almost every day, I got up, went over to the Federal Way Community Center. On some days, I exercised on a stationary bicycle and ran on a treadmill. On alternating days, I swam in the pool, some days swimming up to a mile. At home, I ate less and ate healthier. I ate so much oatmeal I felt like I was channeling Wilford Brimley.

            I tried to make this as easy on myself as possible. I tried to take small steps. I tried to be patient, to be happy with small successes, and not to get too frustrated over setbacks.

            But the plain, simple truth is it was hard. It was hard during my sabbatical, and since my sabbatical has ended, it’s even harder. Every morning, when my alarm goes off, there is a small voice in my head telling me to sleep in. It’s the same voice that calls to me late at night reminding me of the chocolate chip mint ice cream in the freezer. You know the name I have for this voice, don’t you? That’s right. Satan.

            Many times I would ask myself, “So why am I doing this?” Am I doing this because I think getting in shape will make me any more worthy of love? Am I doing this to seek other people’s acceptance and approval - - or to avoid their disapproval? I thought about this a lot while swimming. Since iPods don’t work well in swimming pools, I had a lot of time just to think to myself.

            No, I finally told myself. I’m doing this for myself. I’m doing this because I feel better when I exercise regularly and eat healthily, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I’m doing this because I want to live a longer, healthier life than I would otherwise. I’m doing this because I want to live my life as fully as possible.  

            Sometimes, though, my motivation wanes. While I have a strong desire to live as fully as possibly, there also another tendency, almost equally as strong sometimes, just to pedal along on my training wheels, so to speak. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by a desire to seize the day, and sometimes I am overwhelmed by a desire to seize the sofa. Sometimes it’s difficult to know which desire to follow.

            When this happens, I try to remind myself that to the best of my limited, finite, flawed, and imperfect knowledge, this is the only life I have, and as a result, it is precious to me. In fact, it’s the most precious thing I have.

            When this happens, I try to remind myself that each day, each week, and each year of my life is a precious gift, and at the end of my life, I don’t want to think I have wasted it. I want to have as few regrets as possible. I don’t want to have lived a more limited life than was possible for me. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, I want to have “sucked the marrow” out of life.  As a song in our hymnal says, I don’t want to have run this race in vain.

            Reflecting on these experiences of teaching my son to ride a bicycle and my own efforts at self-improvement has led me to some wider reflections, reflections not only about why we want our children to do certain things but why we do or don’t do certain things ourselves.

            There are two questions in life that that I think are easy to get mixed up.  

            The first question is, “Am I worthy of love?” and the answer to that question is “Yes, no matter what.” In the liberal religious tradition, one of our commonly shared beliefs is that each of us is worthy of love just as we are. Since religion is actually more about learning to see the world in a particular way than believing certain abstract things, another way of saying this is we as religious liberals choose to see ourselves and one another and everybody else in this world as worthy of love just as we are.

            What does this mean more specifically? It means to be worthy of love, you don’t have to learn how to ride a bicycle. You don’t have to get good grades in school. You don’t need to have a job. If you already have a job, you don’t need to a more prestigious job. You don’t need to be successful in the least bit. You don’t need to have a big house or drive a fancy car. You don’t need to be good looking or wear fancy clothes. You don’t have to lose weight. You don’t have to quit smoking or drinking. Really, you don’t need to do any of these things. You don’t need to change a thing about who you are or what you do, and you will still be worthy of love just as you are.

            Of course, most of us - - I include myself - - have a hard time buying into this idea completely. Most of us, at least at times, have doubts and anxieties about our self-worth and wonder whether people like us and love for who we really are rather than the person we are trying to prove to the world we are. Perhaps we wonder whether we are loveable at all just as we are. It doesn’t help that our society spends a lot of time, effort, and money - - billions of dollars a year - - trying to convince us that we aren’t just ok the way we are, but we will be if we do this or buy that.

            As a result, instead of loving ourselves just as we are, we end up living according to the three As - - appearance, achievement, and affluence, or the five Ps - - prestige, power, profit, possession, and pleasure.

            Or some of us, I know, are still spending our lives trying to live up to parents’ expectations, even if those parents have been dead for decades.

            I also know that most of us struggle with the idea that other people are worthy of love just as they are. With our children, it’s sometimes easier. With everybody else, it’s more of a challenge. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, “I’ve often had a passionate desire to serve humanity, and would perhaps have actually gone to the cross for mankind if I had ever been required to do so, and yet at the same time, as I well know my from personal experience, I’m incapable of enduring two days in the same room with another person.”

            So when I say that a commonly shared believe among us is that we believe that each of us is worthy of love just as we are, I fully admit that it is an ideal toward which we imperfectly strive. Nevertheless, I do think it’s one of our more important ones. As one wit once said, “It doesn’t matter what we do until we accept ourselves. Once we accept ourselves, it doesn’t matter what we do.” Or as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says, “Much of the spiritual life is about self-acceptance, much of it, or perhaps all of it.” And when it comes to loving others, well, I think Jesus had some pretty good things to say about that.

            I realize saying as religious liberals we believe that each of us is worthy of love just as we are no matter what we do or don’t do may make our liberal religious tradition sound like ultimate religion for slackers, but remember, I said there were two questions. The first is “Am I worthy of love?” but the second is, “Am I living the deepest, fullest, richest, most abundant, most satisfying life possible for myself?”

            Unlike the first question, the answer to this question may be yes, or it may be no. Perhaps there are a few of us here who are already living our lives as fully as possible. But I suspect that in some ways, many of us are not. I suspect that for many of us there may be some changes we need to make in our lives in order to live it more fully. I suspect that there’s something we need to differently.

            Maybe in our personal lives. Maybe in our religious lives. Maybe in our relationship with a significant other. Maybe in our relationship with family. Maybe in our jobs. Maybe in our involvement with the wider community.

            My suspicion is also that these changes may be difficult or challenging, that they might even be a little scary at first, that they might take a long time. Why do I say such a thing? Well, if these changes were easy, we would have already made them a long time ago.

            Sometimes when I’m tempted to sleep late instead of getting up and exercising, or sometimes when I hear the chocolate chip mint ice cream calling to me from the freezer late at night, I think about a verse in the Gospel of Matthew. I bet you didn’t’ know there was a verse about chocolate chip mint ice cream and sleeping late in the Gospel of Matthew, but there is, and it goes like this:

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

            One interpretation of this verse is that not many people are going to make it to heaven, but I have another interpretation. This verse just reminds me that living the fullest, deepest, richest, most abundant life that is possible us often requires us to do things that are hard, that even scare us, that take a long time, but are ultimately worth it.

            If indeed any of you are contemplating a change in your life, don’t you dare undertake it because you think it might make you more worthy of anybody else’s love, respect, or approval. You are already worthy of all of those things just as you are.

            But if you think this change might lead you to a more satisfying experience of life, I urge you on. Even if it will be difficult. Even if will be scary. Even if it will take a long time.

            Because at the end of this long, wonderful race, none of want to have too many regrets, so choose whatever metaphor you like. Take off your training wheels. Learn to ride fast and free. Don’t run this race in vain.

            So may it be.

            Amen.