What Is A Personal Spiritual Retreat?
by Linda Andersen Retreats for the Curious
Retreat is a time in space for you to receive the joyous truth that God is crazy in love with you. Your heart is what He’s after and not only at the point of salvation, but trickling down through all the years after your initial surrender to His love and provision in Christ.
Working for God is good. But it is not the only aspect of relating to Him. You and I can work for Him and not ever grow to love Him—not ever know Him truly. I know, because I’ve done the “work thing” and it becomes the driest of desert places without love as a foundation.
Picture spending every date with your fiancée pulling bent nails out of old boards. And the whole time, neither one of you talks or smiles at the other. Emotional exchange is simply nonexistent. That’s what it’s like working “for” God without the love factor.
Working for God without knowing His heart for you shrink-wraps the whole message of the cross and reduces it to Him “buying us” in order to get our free services. This kind of service kills something in us if not fed perpetually from an artesian well of Holy Spirit power and love cascading from the inside out. This, then, is why time alone with God becomes our wellspring, our fountainhead, our source. It’s the open door to a waterfall of His presence into our lives that flows out into rivers of love and compassion and Spirit-energized work to those around us.
Retreat is a time cut out of our daily routines for purposeful encounter with God. Sound scary? It isn’t. It’s more like saying “okay” to a date with someone you’ve seen, admired, had in your home, and want to know more about. But this particular invitation, engraved in love, is sent from God to us. It’s Him pulling at our heart to meet with Him. He wants to know you and me better! Amazing crazy-quilt grace!
You feel His drawing…you’re impelled toward the invitation. Why? Because, like all of us, you respond to being dearly loved and sought after by your lover. You long for unconditional love and wonder if this is only a pipe dream or an honest-to-goodness possibility while still on earth.
Personal, spiritual retreat is a place where love happens between God and you, His beloved child, His bride, His purchased one.
Again, retreat is an intentional, on-purpose tryst with the living God who made us, loves us beyond explanation, and wants us to stop “playing” and “working” long enough to “sit on His lap.” That’s what good fathers do!
Spiritual retreat is His time woven even more tightly into our time, for the purpose of nurturing our body, restoring our soul, and nourishing spirit-deep love bonding between us and Him, the birth Father.
Come away, then, for He has been waiting to turn our questions into answers and dare us to allow our secrets to unfold into the safest of arms.
Could there be a better invitation?