Sometimes a little encouragement is good enough for the moment.  I’ve had a few good friends encourage me with just a nugget that gets me through the next few steps.  I got this text message from a friend who I was sharing my journey with.  Good stuff.

Heres some encouragement… wanna be a friend of Jesus?

My basic prayer for the last the 20 years has been that God would grant me the honor of becoming a best friend of His Son. I had forgotten that Jesus had sent his original best friend, the Apostle John, to live in a cave on the Island of Patmos.

He exiled John to a lonely cave in his old age. And then Jesus came to John in the cave and gave him the revelation that has given all his little ones faith and courage to fight the good fight for the last two thousand years. One day Jesus will come back and make all the wrong things right, and for a few years of temporal faithfulness Jesus will give us an eternal reward so great that it can’t be described or imagined with our present earthbound language. That’s what John saw in the cave.

And now I think that Jesus sends all his best friends into a cave for some period of their lives. Maybe more than once.

And the cave is where they learn that the pain of this life, no matter how severe or complicated or unfair, is ultimately an invitation to the party we’ve all been looking for down here, but have never found. So today, I’m trying to fight the good and great fight by looking forward to the party that will never end.

Grace and peace.