A Retreat

This past weekend I helped lead the Open Door fall retreat. In reality there wasn't that much leadership needed. We wanted to provide a space and time for people to talk, pray, eat, and enjoy some time relaxing together. We focused the retreat around the five practices of the Open Door, listening, learning, eating, encouraging, and giving. Each of the these practices had been preached on and discussed prior to the retreat. We wanted to provide time for people to talk about how they've begun doing these things in their lives and we wanted to provide time for people to actually do them. I haven't got a lot of feedback yet about whether people liked our laid back approach to this retreat, but Alyssa and I loved it. It was restful and spiritually rejuvenating for me. Rock climbing was great. It rained all weekend but I didn't really care. The quiet time of prayer while walking our new labyrinth was great, I need to create space for that in my life, actually in my yard, I'm thinking about creating a labyrinth in our front yard (BJ's idea), it's plenty big I think.