Retreat Planning Wrap Up

Yesterday was a great day of retreat planning.  For those of you who have never done this kind of work, you may imagine that we sit there and discuss the schedule or what we plan to offer.  While we do continue to do some fine tuning of the schedule, this retreat is almost 20 years old, so we keep the schedule the same from year to year.

We do have some discussion about the workshops and drop in stations that we offer, but the larger conversation is about the Bible passage that will shape the retreat.  Once we offered every workshop or drop in station that people volunteered to teach, but now we try to offer the majority of creative activities that will tie into the retreat.

At the planning session, we also plan for the retreat for the year after the year of the upcoming retreat, so yesterday we turned our attention to 2020.  We have a 3 year cycle where we focus on a different aspect of the Trinity, so by 2020, we'll be back to God the Creator.

I suggested that we do the Annunciation story, God as Creator of the baby Jesus.  I suggested that if we felt very daring, we could have a conversation about sex and God.  We backed away from that, not because we're cowardly people but because in 2021, we'll be back to a Jesus year.  It's an interesting question:  is the Annunciation story more about God the creator, or the baby Jesus, or Mary?  Yes, to all of those.

I suggested we study Noah and the flood.  In 2011, we focused on a difficult aspect of God when we explored the second Genesis story, the expulsion from the Garden.  I said it might be time for a difficult subject again:  what do we do when we're surrounded by wreckage?  How do we create again?

Much to my surprise, we decided that we liked that idea.  So many of us will face such deep losses in a normal lifetime, not to mention the deep losses that some of us will experience in addition to the normal losses.  How do we reclaim our lives out of wreckage?

We kept planning the 2019 and the 2020 retreat until 3.  Then a group of us headed over to Hendersonville for a gallery hop.  Actually, we didn't hop much--we mainly wanted to see the display of one of our Create in Me potter friends.  At some point, maybe I'll post some pictures that I took; she's a very talented potter and assemblage artist.

After that, we went to the Sierra Nevada brewery; I think of them as a western brewery, but they actually have a huge brewery near the Asheville airport.  They also have a beautiful brewpub, where we had the kind of dinner I like best:  we kept ordering everything on the menu that looked good, sharing them until we were full.  I had 2 beers and tastes of everything that looked interesting on the menu, all for $35.

I am trying to walk 10,000 steps every day in September, so some of us went for a moonlight/flashlight walk when we returned to camp.  It was beautiful.

Soon my kind friends will wake much earlier than they would otherwise to take me to the airport.  It's been a good trip here, but it's time to go back.  I'm interested to see how much progress has been made on the floors.  I'm interested to see if my spouse has made any decisions about the kitchen cabinets.  I need to get ready for the week ahead--the week before another quarter starts at school.

But for now, let me keep breathing the mountain air.  Let me rest in the comfort of camp for just another bit of time.