Colorado Sun Shines on Sea to Sea Tour
July 28, 2008 -- Under a sweltering, Colorado sun, Rev. Jerry Dkystra spoke from the Book of Job about facing life's challenges in the message he delivered on Sunday to Sea to Sea riders and others attending a service in the Englewood High School Stadium.
The service began as Sea to Sea riders rode around the football field and then sat down on the hot, metal bleachers. Following a rough week in which the Sea to Sea Tour took them on rugged roads up and over the Rocky Mountains, they spent Saturday night at Denver Christian High School.
Dykstra, executive director of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, spoke "about life's tough questions which we often ask," says Claire Elgersma, the tour spokesperson, in her blog.
In biking across the country, says Elgerma, Dkystra challenged riders to keep in mind that the ride, especially at the end of a grueling day, "is not about us. Who we are and what we are doing is about being used by God to communicate the larger vision of who God is and what he calls each of us to do."
"The service was formed around the biblical theme of creation, fall, redemption, and renewal," says Cynthia Aukema, of Chatham, Ont., in her blog "It was the goal of the organizers of this service that the Spirit of God stir in us all a renewed hope and action in the name of Jesus."
The service also included a moving celebration of communion that involved several ministers from the CRC as well as the Reformed Church in America, which is helping the CRC to sponsor the tour.
As the service went on, a few riders took shelter from the blazing sun under some of the Ministry Fair tents that had been set up to give riders and others a sense of the variety of ministries in which sponsoring agencies and local mission organizations are involved. Before and after the service, riders and others took an opportunity to browse through the tents.
Various items were sale and at one tent Marti Du Plessis was especially fascinated by candles from Namibia and beadwork from Kenya,
"The beads from were made from rolled up magazines that are glued, varnished and nicely painted. I bought earrings that look like little bicycles, all made of recyclable wire and beads."
The ministry tents, says Du Plessis, of Newmarket, Ont., featured "projects run in the third world to get impoverished people to break the vicious and confining cycle of deprivation, and to give them a sense of self esteem and 'I can'."
The tour is taking participants across the United States and part of Canada in an effort to raise $1.5 million to fight global poverty.
Fifteen new cyclists joined the tour for the next part of the journey, which today takes them from Denver along U.S. 76 on a mostly downhill ride to Fort Morgan.
As he is biking his way across the continent, Lou Haveman, of Grand Rapids, Mich., has been reminded of the value of leaving the predictability of the everyday world for a venture such as this.
"I have come to an awareness of something we all know but too often neither practice nor seek. We have to leave the known, disregard the comfortable, embrace the challenge, and live with hope when there seems little," he writes in his blog. "Then, and only then will we experience the joy of the common that seem just exquisite."
—CRC Communications