From Rich Dixon

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Last time I told you Becky and I reached a turning point.

We knew about human trafficking. We couldn’t turn away. We had to do something.

I told you something else that’s important to the story. I don’t want to skip over it.

I’m just an old guy who rides a silly bike. We weren’t missionaries. We didn’t have any special training, didn’t have a platform, didn’t have an organization behind us.

The day we left for the Mississippi River, our missions pastor pulled me aside and said something silly. “Rich, you know you’re a missionary now, right?”

I thought about that a lot, but didn’t really believe it. How could I be a missionary?

In all the years I hung around church, I got the impression that missionaries were special. They had some sort of secret handshake. The rest of us only supported missionaries.

I used to think that’s how the church was supposed to do missions, and Becky and I didn’t fit. We just wondered if we could bring people together around the idea of riding bikes and following Jesus.

Now I think we all have unique gifts and talents, and we don’t need to wait around until we have it all figured out. We don’t need permission. Jesus already gave us permission.

We weren’t an official nonprofit. We didn’t have experience (or a coherent plan). People kept labeling what we wanted to do as a “ministry,” but to me that didn’t feel necessary.

I think that’s what happens when you create offices and hierarchies and bureaucracies and labels. A notion comes along that doesn’t fit into one of the boxes, and people get uncomfortable.

So, we did a crazy thing.

We decided to do a 500-mile bike ride along the Colorado Front Range. And we hung up a sign and invited people to join us.

When you do crazy things, you get crazy results…especially when you invite Jesus along.

To be continued…