Monday, June 29 – Sunday, July 5

From four hundred men in a cave to six hundred men in the wilderness — the community is growing, but it is not growing in comfort. They are still moving from place to place. Saul is still searching for them. The promise has not yet become the throne. And yet something irreplaceable is being knit together in those years of shared hardship: trust.

Serving and struggling together brings us together and brings others to the table. There is a quality of community that can only be formed in difficulty — not because suffering is good in itself, but because shared suffering strips away pretense. You cannot perform your way through a wilderness. You cannot maintain a curated version of yourself when you are exhausted, afraid, and far from home. What is left, when all of that falls away, is either real friendship or nothing at all.

By the time David is king, those wilderness men are administrators, priests, commanders, recorders — the infrastructure of a whole kingdom. They were not recruited for those roles. They were formed into them, over years of saying yes to one more hard thing, together. Their faithfulness in the cave became the credential for the throne room.
Do not be quick to leave the difficult seasons of community. The disagreement that tests your friendship, the period of shared uncertainty, the year when your City Group is honest about hard things instead of merely pleasant — these are not signs the community is failing. They may be signs it is actually forming.