This is how you lock a bike.

This is taken at the Working Bikes Cooperative, where I was yesterday buying a used bicycle. My bike was stolen about six weeks ago. It was my second bike taken at the hands of bike thieves since moving into the city and they were both stolen in roughly the same location. My first bike was stolen right outside our worship space in the South Loop (610 S. Michigan) and the second one was also stolen on Michigan Avenue, about three blocks north of the site of the first theft. They were both locked.

I wish I had some sort of deep theological reflection about the nature of humanity (and I have pondered this), but all I could think of yesterday while pondering the spending of more cash because some idiot decided to saw my lock in half and take a bike that was given to me by a kind-hearted person who had heard about my first bike being stolen, was: This sucks. At times, I’ve had fleeting moments of thinking, Well, maybe the thief needs it more than me and blah blah blah, but, as I said those moments are fleeting. 

Instead, I buy another bike and buy an even sturdier lock and recognize that people will steal. I can either grouse about that or get back on the two wheels and hope and trust that my relationship with this new bike will be long-lasting.