My Yearly Get-Away.

In college, I used to run the SEARCH retreat program. Admittedly, it is one major part of college that I still long for and wish I had the opportunity to still be involved with, especially now that I'm not "doing ministry" full-time anymore. I think that's why I have LOVED being involved in the Young Adult Retreat.

Every year this retreat takes place, usually on Superbowl weekend, although this year it was a week earlier, and I LOVE IT! The first year I was here, I was working at the church, but I just helped out a little with the retreat and wasn't on the team. Last year I had just quit working at the church when they were getting the team together, but I really hoped they'd ask me to be on it, and they did! It was awesome.

This year, our team was back together again, and it was AWESOME! Lots of things were different--the priest who usually helps us has been reassigned to Grants Pass (waaaaay Southern Oregon), so he couldn't come to any of our meetings, the amazing woman who usually co-leads with that priest found out she couldn't come, we had to have it a week early...but all in all, it was okay. It was awesome to have basically the same team together again--we all knew each other since we'd done it before so we worked really well together. My teammates are some of the most amazing people EVER, so it was a blast to hang out and pray and play and minister together.

Two of the lovely women on my team--love these girls! :) (This was on the last day...you can see in my eyes that I was both exhausted and sick...but cute photo, otherwise!)

I had to write a talk about "The Authentic Life"--basically about how to figure out God's will for your life and then follow it--something I am decidedly NOT an expert at, and something I have been struggling with greatly lately. *sigh* So writing this talk took no small amount of effort. It's not really something you can just wing, either, when you have to talk for 30 minutes and are expected to have a powerpoint with video clips and the whole nine yards. I wrote my talk about 12 times in the past several months, and each time it just wasn't doing it for me. I finally got something put together, and when we got to the retreat center, I realized I had forgotten my notes in Portland. I frantically tried to recreate them from my powerpoint and the book we were roughly using as an outline (luckily my talk wasn't first!), and then when I got up there...very little of my talk was what I planned to talk about! But it went GREAT!! People were laughing and engaged the whole time (for some reason, apparently I can be pretty funny when I'm speaking in front of a group, because I can definitely make people laugh, but I don't really feel like I'm a funny person), and I think I got through what I was supposed to talk about and made the points I needed to make. Interestingly, I don't totally remember what I talked about. Before my talk, I asked God/the Holy Spirit to just give me the words people needed to hear, and apparently that was what happened. So cool.

I love this! This was right behind us in the room where we gave all the talks, did music, etc.

My good friend Deborah and I were in charge of music for the weekend, and boy do I love doing music with that girl! She's a great musician and (at the risk of sounding boastful) we sound pretty great together. So despite still suffering from the plague (2 1/2 months--ugh!), I managed to sing and not cough into the microphone. And despite not really picking up my guitar in the last, oh, 5 months, I played for several hours over the course of the weekend--in front of everyone--and it didn't completely suck! :) This is good news.

Anyway, despite being sick and exhausted and stressed out, it was a great weekend for me in a beautiful place, and we had a wonderful time. One of the priests I was talking to about things going on in my life said, "So...what are you doing to take care of you? I hear all the things you're saying, and I can tell you're a very busy person, but what are you doing to take care of you?" Ummm...yeah. I'm working on that.

Don't worry...I had already gotten my turn earlier in the day from the lovely woman in front of me, JoBeth. Love this girl!