Here are some loose strands from various places for your growth:

The Difficult Discipline of Joy: What Keeps Us from Seeing God? – Clinton Manley (DG)
Joy is indeed a difficult discipline. Greed, self-centeredness, and the relentless pull of inattention constantly creep in and cut us off from divine delights.

With Friendship in Decline, Belonging Is a Powerful Apologetic – Sam Allberry (TGC)
What will show the presence of heaven itself among God’s people? What will show that God is alive and well and right here? It’s our love for one another. This isn’t an afterthought, as though what really mattered were other things and our love for one another was the icing on the cake. No, the quality of our relational life is to be an apologetic to the world around us.

Humility and Overcommitted Busyness – Alasdair Groves (Ligonier)
I want to direct our gaze to a significant blemish on humility in our own generation where we need further chipping and sanding: our overcommitted busyness.

Unpacking “Look inside Yourself” – Brian Rosner (Crossway)
Humans are not self-defining, isolated units. The biggest problem with only looking inside to find yourself is that it is hopelessly reductionistic, ignoring crucial dimensions of what it means to be a human being. Human identity does not exist in isolation, it cannot be defined without reference to the narrative in which it finds itself. We know ourselves by looking around to our closest relationships, back and forward to our shared life stories, and upward to something bigger than ourselves. We are profoundly social, deeply story-driven, and we have eternity in our hearts.

Flashback: The Shepherd’s Care
Is this how you think of God – as a gentle shepherd?