A long journey

 Sometimes you plan on a long trip.  Many special vacations are like that.  You sit down and decide what you want to do and you make a plan and you set aside the money to be able to pay for the things that you are going to need and you plan a decision to go.  Most of the long journeys that I have been on are this kind of journey.  Of course there is fun in spontaneity, but it does not usually seem like spontaneous trips last as long as these kind of well planned out journeys.  In some respects in order for the journey to be long, it almost has to be planned out.  

And then there are the kinds of long journeys that you don't plan on.  These kinds of journeys are not the fun vacation kind, but the slow life-changing events that happen in your life and you really have no control over them at all.  Cancer happens.  And goes on and on.  Pain happens.  And drags itself out and lasts.  Death happens to someone you love and the grief carries and continues.  These kinds of journeys are never fun in the same sense as a vacation.  They hurt.  And they last.  And it calls for a special kind of response that the Bible refers to as "endurance."  We are to endure.  When we go through this kind of long and painful journey we are to endure.  Paul tells it to Timothy - "Suffer hardship with me as a good soldier of Jesus Christ."  (2 Tim. 2:3-4, NASB)  Or the author of Hebrews reminds us that, "It is for discipline that you endure. . ."  (Hebrews 12:7, NASB).  This kind of endurance is not something that most of us want to develop or even would ask for, and yet it is so critical for our growth and maturity in Christ.  It is something that God calls us to do and something that Christ exemplified for us.  So in the midst of your long journey (the kind that is not a vacation at all) today, endure hardship with me for the sake of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!