It’s 8:35 in the morning and I am in the back of a rental truck typing this on my iPhone, and the truck keeps hitting bumps and taking steep curves somewhere in the middle of central Texas. You would think by this point I would be developing motion sickness, but instead all I can think about is how good it feels to be on this journey. No shower, no food yet, and no sleep last night, but it feels good. Really good.

It feels good for two reasons:

1) We are on a journey. We know where we are headed. We make choices along the way about whether to take the scenic route or the non-scenic one; whether to stop for Mexican food or seafood; who should be driving on a certain leg of the trip; and discussing where the pyramids come from. But with all of the choices we have to make, it doesn’t slow us down or deter us from our destination. We are all very clear that we are headed home. We all agree that at the end of the day we will be back in Denton with our families and our church family. We are on a journey, and we know where we are going.

2) The second reason it feels good to bounce around in the back of a truck early on a Wednesday morning is that we are on a journey together. I love to drive. I drive to Tennessee to see my family instead of flying, and if I get restless at night I usually take a drive around town. But driving around by yourself at night because you are restless has a far different feel than riding mid-morning in a vehicle with no empty seats. When you are riding by yourself, fifteen minutes can seem like an hour. But when you are riding with others, a full day’s ride can seem to be only a short jaunt down the street.

The Lord has blessed this church family. He has blessed us with two wonderful gifts! We have a journey and we have each other. I have noticed that the recent event of Harvest Sunday and Patrick Mead’s visit has stirred conversation about these things in our community. Good! The more we have conversation about our journey, the more we begin to see that God has already taken this church family on a journey. We are a church that has already journeyed through the difficulties of pandering to the critiques of other fellowships; a church that has traversed the fears of working ecumenically with others for the sake of the kingdom; and a church that has had enough vision to keep gender from being a determining factor in hiring a children’s minister. We have definitely been on a journey! And this journey is not solely ours! How many among us would have projected the turns we’ve taken as a fellowship or the choices we would have had to make? Only one…the Holy Spirit! He has taken us down this journey, following paths in our journey where some have gone before us but also forging paths where there was no visible road.

But the journey isn’t over and these conversations I am hearing in pockets all around Singing Oaks prove it! God wants to take us so much farther and deeper into the Denton community than we have ever been before! The canvas is bright and clean and there is no limit to the art that God can create through us! Maybe it will be an enlarged benevolence ministry that will be the next chapter in our story. Perhaps more church planting will be the next wave that we ride together into 2011. Maybe we will start house churches in neighboring apartment complexes and allow our attendance to shoot through the roof…not in our building but all over the city!

Whatever the case, I am excited to be on this journey and to be on it with you. Just like this morning’s ride, we will hit bumps and take turns too fast, but the fact is that we will know exactly where we are headed and we will have everything we need for our journey — each other…