My family moved to Brisbane Australia in December 2003 and I returned to Hong Kong to continue working there for a further 2½ years.
Now it is my habit to start each day in prayer. But upon returning to HK, every time I would begin to try to pray, I would keep seeing pictures in my mind of a Chang Jiang motorcycle and sidecar with me riding it. I would try hard to focus on the list of things I wanted to pray about (the list did not include motorbikes and sidecars - Wendy and I had agreed that I wouldn't ride a motorbike in HK traffic), but these mind pictures kept interrupting my prayer time. I went to see my pastor about the trouble I was having praying: is this an attack from the devil, or what? He prayed with me and then said, "Do you suppose God might be asking you to buy the kind of motorbike you keep seeing in your prayer times?" So I added the potential purchase of a motorbike and sidecar to my prayer list. Since I was now committed to praying daily for it, my prayer times became much less disrupted.
A few days after my talk with the pastor, I e-mailed Simon Vallance and received back the web-site address for "Chang Jiang Unlimited." I logged in and spent hours looking at photographs of these beautiful sidecar outfits, knowing that I would sooner or later own one.
Almost forty years down the trail:
In May 2004, I telephoned Simon Vallance and caught the bus around to his place where he allowed me to go for a ride on one of his two Chang Jiang outfits. The black one in the photo at top right is the bike I rode that day. I took it on all the rough back tracks around the village in which simon lives. I loved it! He said my grin was so wide my ears were nearly falling in! Now I knew that I knew that I knew that I really wanted one. But was it really God's will? Wendy was against me owning another motorbike. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" says the old proverb, so I decided that if God really wanted me to buy it, he would cause Wendy to change her mind. I guess I was treating it kind of like the fleece that was laid out by Gideon in the Bible when he was seeking to know God's will.
I went down to Australia for the school holidays in June and asked Wendy about buying the bike. Her response was, "I shall really have to pray about that!"
The next day she came to me and said, "You know that motorbike and sidecar you asked about? ... I really believe God wants you to buy it!"
Wow! . . . In a few short weeks, the trail was really hotting up!
