Retreat Can Look Like a Lot of Things
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Hi Friends,
Thank you so much for your prayers for the Spring Contemplative Retreat. God was exceedingly faithful! From the unheard-of April temperatures in the 70s, sunshine glistening off Portage Lake with retreaters spread across the acreage to what God individually did in each person’s life.
It’s a weekend that we will remember for a long time.
Along with all the good things, I thought I would share some of the struggles I was battling on the inside, at this new way of doing retreat. Leading with a few common scenarios, maybe you’ll see yourself in one of them.
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Meeting with Katherine at the end of her stay in the cabin, she glowed, sharing how powerfully God had worked through a guided journal and fictional book she brought on her two-day retreat. Then, almost catching herself in an admission of guilt, the elation drained from her face as she sheepishly said,
“I feel like I’m cheating bringing a fictional book with me, but I’ve found that’s the way I relax between the periods of intensity God takes me on.”
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A different time, Heather “confessed” that she brought her phone and AirPods on Retreat because many times she experiences God through worship music.
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And the funniest example. When Sharon came home from a retreat overflowing as she told her husband all that God did, his eyes lit up as a picture formed of what a retreat could look like for him. He would take a weekend by himself at the fish camp they loved!
“No, no, no!” Sharon screamed on the inside and chided him on the outside. Imagining fish camp, filled with people. “Mr. Extrovert”, might be quiet for a little while but then would probably make his way around and talk to everyone. That is NOT retreat!
Telling me about this a while later, we had to laugh at ourselves. Omg, here was her husband dreaming of the retreat God was going to take him on and she squashed it, like a mosquito on a hot, summer night!
I get it, I probably would have done the same thing!
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Ever since starting to plan this year’s Spring Contemplative Retreat with Jenn and Keith in a different format than I had done before, I worried. I knew this invitation had come from God. Yet never having experienced a Contemplative Retreat before, I battled fear and felt a fierce impulse to protect the treasure we had discovered in Silent Retreating. The Lord had to talk me off the ledge more than once.
Why is it so easy to want to make a “rule” about how God moves, so quickly after we experience Him?
Almost immediately we get set in our ways and declare, “THIS is what retreating or growing in relationship with God, or prayer, or church looks like. In our longing to protect the sacred, we can put ourselves and others in bondage and miss the endless ways God has for us to experience Him.
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The Mountain of Transfiguration reminds us, it’s not anything new.
When Jesus took Peter, James, and John up on a high mountain and Moses and Elijah appeared, Jesus was transfigured. His face shone like the sun and his clothes were as white as light. Immediately, Peter blurted out his great idea, “I know, we can make three tabernacles right here and stay, forever!” (The “Lori” translation)
Peter, just like us, in the euphoria of the visitation wanted to make a “rule” out of it. Thought he had it all figured out. All set to patent it. Done. Case Closed. Check!
It was never meant to be the only way, but just the way for that moment.
As soon as we try to make anything a one-size-fits-all, God mercifully prevents it. Even though the process can be painful, he loves us too much to leave us there.
After observing Him this weekend so powerfully drawing people to His heart through the Contemplative Retreat; in not only silence and time alone with God but contemplative practices, conversation at meals and campfires in the evening, I’m so thankful that He did.
I know, I’m a slow learner.
~ Lori
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When have you had an experience where God was trying to give you something new and you were afraid or resisted?