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I’ve heard about these mythical families with kids that like long road trips. While it may exist, this was not the reality in my family when our kids were growing up. We tried the long drive vacation a couple of times, and it was comically disastrous. We quickly became a “get there as fast as possible” family. We focused on the destination and the travel became the price of admission.

One of the many things I love about Grace is our church-planting vision. We are entering the season where we are starting to send out our current residents. Some are still waiting for God to show them the details of their next steps, and some have their God-given assignments and are ready to go out and plant churches.

If you have a few moments, do a mental exercise with me – in your mind, paint a picture that exemplifies how you feel about or view your relationship to God. What is the first image that comes to your mind? I do this occasionally as part of self-examination (2 Corinthians 13:5), and it is often really revealing to me.

Today, I’d like to connect few strings from recent posts: The Friends We Need and The Great Enemy of Rest. In the latter, we looked at Hebrews 3-4 and saw that unbelief (or a lack of dependent faith) is the great enemy of our spiritual rest. One other thing I wanted to separately draw out from that passage is the importance of our friends in helping us fight unbelief and maintain our rest in God. In the middle of the warning against unbelief, the author of Hebrews exclaims, “Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; but exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today!” Hebrews 3:12-13.

Several of us Gracers recently finished up a Tuesday evening Bible study on Suffering and Comfort. One week out, and I miss the fellowship of that group of brothers and sisters, my friends. It is such a blessing to enjoy a group of fellow believers that prays together, listens, receives comfort from and comforts each other as we all spend time in the furnace of various afflictions as God molds us into the glorious image of His Son and draws us near in His comfort. None of that time in the furnace is meaningless.