A "Free" Bike!

So my wife found this bike at the side of the road:

She took it home and asked me if I could fix it.

I like to imagine that I am pretty handy so I said, "Of course!"

The rear wheel had a flat tire. I remembered changing a tire back when I was 16 so I was pretty certain I could do that.

I started by taking the rear wheel off. That took a little bit of finicky work, but I got it.

As I was doing that I noticed that the chain was pretty rusted. I did some work on chains last summer so I figured I could replace that pretty easily. I also noticed that the gears on the rear wheel were pretty badly rusted. If I was replacing the chain why not replace the gears? It couldn't be that hard could it?

So I went shopping for spare parts. The bike shop in town wasn't open on a Saturday (?) so I ended up driving to the next town over. I got a new chain, a new set of gears, a new inner tube, and a couple of tools.

I proceeded to try to take things apart. Youtube helped, but mostly I discovered that trying to make do with the tools I had wouldn't work. I needed to go buy some specialized tools. It was late in the day, so I stopped. I also broke my chain tool.

During the next week I went shopping again, found out I had purchased the wrong set of gears, got the correct tools and the correct parts.

Next Saturday I started in on the bike again. After an hour of fighting with the old wheel, I gave up. Drove back to the store for the third time and bought a new wheel. They guy in the store asked me if I wanted him to put the wheel, tube, tire, and gears together. I said, "Sure!" I watched him assemble, in fifteen minutes, what I had been struggling with for two weeks. Then I took the wheel home, mounted it on the bike, put the new chain on, and got the bike working.

My son was riding the bike on Sunday and it worked.

His "free" bike only cost:

• 3 trips to the store
• 6 hours of work (I think!)
• A new wheel, inner tube, freewheel gear sprocket, and chain
• A busted old tool
• 4 new tools, one of which was stripped while working on it.

What's more, the front wheel is really rusty and I'm afraid it may have a leak, the gear shifters don't really work all that well, in fact he only has access to about 6 of the 21 gears, the rear brakes don't work great, and the seat probably should be replaced too.

Quite frankly, I think that if I had put the same effort into Kijiji I bet I could have bought a decent used bike for the same amount of money I spent fixing up this free one and done it in less time.

Now, this blog isn't about fixing bikes, it's about Christian education.

I wonder if the same mentality as I used when approaching this bike infects Christian Education. We look at our tight budgets and try to do things as cheaply as possible, not realizing that in the long run it costs more and we end up with a "product" that isn't as good as it could be. (I don't love the word "product" here! But that's another story.)

I think this applies in quite a few places in our schools, but there's one place in particular that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about.

Curriculum.

There are so many free tools and options out there that it's really easy to turn to teachers and tell them to go a build something themselves using whatever they can find. It can be done, I know, I've been doing it for years. So have lots of other teachers.

But I think we can do better. In fact, we have, in the past. I think it's time we do it again.

The Case for Christ Student Response #10

In the first term of this school year my grade 7/8 class has read The Case for Christ: Student Edition by Lee Strobel. At the end of the study of the book each student was asked to answer one of the questions posed in the chapters of the book. I told that I would be sharing their responses online. So, throughout the rest of the year I will be posting their work. Please note, I have not edited these responses, they are exactly what the student handed me.

Did Jesus fake his death?

“Did Jesus fake his death?” Over the course of history this question has been commonly asked and has brought forward many different theories from both believers and non believers alike.  There are many people who believe that Jesus never existed.  Some believe he existed but did not die on the cross and therefore was not resurrected, another belief is that Jesus purposely faked his death! It is my belief along with many christians that Jesus did die on the cross and was resurrected.  Through my readings and research I found evidence to support my belief.  

The swoon theory states that Jesus was still alive when he was removed from the cross and that he just appeared dead because he had been stunned and was in a state of shock.  In the popular book “The Passover Plot” they state the belief that Jesus enlisted the help of few important variables to help him accomplish an elaborate hoax fooling the Romans into believing he had actually died.  They believe that the Jesus could have been drugged when he was given a sponge with liquid on it while he was on the cross.  The liquid or drug could have been something to put Jesus in a coma like state.

Could any of these above theories be true, did Jesus fake his death?  In order to disprove these ideas you have to look carefully at all the historical events surrounding Jesus’s death.  Especially the details of his flogging and Crucifixion.  The idea that Jesus tricked people into believing he had died goes against what most people believe because all the stories of Jesus in the bible portray him to have been a highly moral person.  Thus I do not think it would have been in his character to do this.

Could Jesus have survived the flogging and the crucifixion and have been just stunned or in a coma?  It is hard to imagine someone surviving these horrible acts as they are very harsh and violent and were carried out by roman soldiers.  The Roman Soldiers were very experienced at their jobs.  They performed numerous crucifixions daily and had to identify when people were dead on a daily basis.  They were brutal soldiers who carried out their duties with confidence.  The flogging was a ruthless form of whipping in which the soldiers used short whips with sharp pieces of metal, rocks or bones tied to the ends in order to lash their victims.  Jesus would have endured many many lashes which he would have likely been close to death even before his crucifixion.  When Jesus was on the cross, the nails went thru his wrists likely severing nerves and arteries and it is explained that once someone can no longer push up with their feet they cannot breath and die a slow death by asphyxiation.  Even if Jesus had been alive up till this point, one of the roman soldiers put a spear in Jesus side.  It was witnessed by the apostle John that he saw blood and water come out of the spear wound.  The blood and water is indication of a life threatening injury as the watery fluid coming out indicates that the spear entered Jesus lung causing a medical injury which is named “pericardial effusion.”  

Following all the brutality Jesus was put into the tomb with a rock slab over him that weighed a ton.  If he had been alive at this point he would have had to escape the burial wrappings and roll away the extremely heavy stone as well as get passed numerous guards unnoticed.  After suffering all the trauma Jesus came to the disciples who witnessed him in full healthy form with no blood or injuries.  Not one disciple but many witnessed this.  For all the above reasons I believe that Jesus did not fake his death and that he died on the cross and was truly resurrected from the dead.

Bibliography:

@AiG. "The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Faking Death." Answers in Genesis. N.p., 29 Mar. 2013. Web. 27 Nov. 2016.

Cut2thetruth. "Did Jesus Fake His Death?" Cut2TheTruth. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998. Print.