If you followed the last few weeks, you’ll know FREEDOM TOUR 2016 featured some intense evening discussions.

You might guess that by the time the ride ended, we were a pretty tight group. That’s what happens in a community that serves and sacrifices together and challenges each other.

You might also guess there had been no small amount of conflict. That’s also part of community – we want to imagine hugs and kumbaya, but the real world isn’t that way. In this kind of environment, hurts and biases are difficult to conceal.

Community. Is. Hard.

A remarkably diverse group of folks spent a week discussing intimate topics around faith. Those discussions extended beyond the evening sessions. They shaped lunchtime conversations, dialogue as we rode, and certainly some individual conversations with Jesus.

Our host the last evening had a fire pit. After dinner, my teammates helped me navigate the stone path. We sat in silence under clear Rocky Mountain skies.

It was almost like Jesus spent the week preparing us for that final gathering around The Fire.

I don’t remember how the conversation started. I just know that somehow, a remarkably transparent interaction about inclusion and exclusion ensued.

Sharing, on a deep, personal level, about the pain of feeling excluded. Of loving someone who had been excluded, for all sorts of reasons.

There was pushback, of course, from those few who don’t see it. But around The Fire, this time, the excluded folks didn’t retreat into the shadows. Didn’t wait for others to speak up.

Honestly, I don’t remember my part in this amazing discussion. What I recall is thinking this might have been the sort of interaction the disciples had around campfires as they traveled with Jesus.

Nothing was “solved,” but that’s not the point. Just like those first disciples, we came away from The Fire with uncertainty. With questions. Perhaps that’s the point.

Community, difficult as it is, is the point.

“Love God… Love one another…” is the point.