I
t is such an unbelievable blessing that I get to talk about Jesus with my best friend now. When I was first falling in with the "Church crowd", I was pretty much resigned to a certain loneliness. I was pretty sure my friends and family wouldn't literally abandon me, but I figured that there would be a new kind of distance, one unlikely to ever be bridged. But now one of my oldest friends has taken the same leap, the friend with whom I've consistently had the most varied and in-depth conversations. We were both "there", in the before-times; we knew how one another felt, and thought; we saw each other struggling with the world, and tried to make sense of our struggles to one another. Probably there's no one else who so intimately knows my own spiritual journey, having seen so many of the same landmarks and vistas. And now we're in a new stage of the journey together, mirror-image sacramental-Christians, living with our wives and children in the countryside, not fifteen miles the one from the other. Providential. I wonder what the Holy Spirit has in mind with this excellent arrangement.