God's time (completed)
Ahhh, everything is so great, dontchya think? This weekend I went on the annual fall PSF retreat to Toah Nippi (sp?). ::warm sigh:: it was so incredibly great. We got to the place around 8:30 and proceeded to settle in. I can't remember the exact details of the night, but we played a few icebreaker type games, had a Compline service, chatted and just hung out. Haha, my car also stayed up really late and played a practical joke on one of the other cars... nothing malicious, we just led them on a little scavanger hunt to find some things that we "borrowed." :) haha, speaking of which, the other car pranked us back by prancing about in some underwear that they borrowed from us. Ahaha, very stunning james and kathrine ;) Oh, we also played a bit of late night frisbee in the freezing cold weather. Let me tell you, frisbee at night with poor lighting is not a very good idea. On saturday we all slept in (well except for Katie who is crazy and went running) and had a late breakfast consisting of eggs and pancakes prepared by stacy and katie. James and I also took our turns at pancake flipping though. Haha, James made the mother of all pancakes, ::grin:: it was great! After breakfast, the adult leaders gave some testimonies about discernement in their lives. After we broke up into pair to do a little one-on-one discerning. Oh, if you hadn't noticed, discernment was the theme of the retreat this weekend. Summarized really poorly, discernment is a process in which you make decisions through prayer and talking about it with other people. The one-on-one was really nice. I got to talk about some stuff that has been bothering me and get feedback on it. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one with "problems." After we all got back from our little discussions we had a lunch of sandwiches and then we had the next few hours to do whatever we wanted. For a while Vanessa, Seth, Dennis, Matt, James and I played Ultimate frisbee. Then liz joined us a little while later and we played touch football. All of these games didn't last too long, due to the freezing cold, so James and Matt headed back to the house while Vanessa, Liz, and I went to the main lodge to play a little piano and sing. We quickly found out that the piano was horribly out of tune, so we went to one of the other small lodges and sat an talked for.. oh I have no idea how long. One of the things about the retreat was that no one had any watches or clocks. The idea was that by not knowing what time it was, we'd be a lot more relaxed... and it was true. It was so nice to just not worry about a schedule or anything like that and just play it by ear. MMmmm :) Anyway, Dennis, Laurie, and Seth joined us at the lodge and we all chatted about PSF and various issues. it was quite productive. After a long while, we decided we should go back to our little house and get started on our dinner, which we did. We made a bunch of pizzas from toppings and cheeeseee and sause and bobeli crusts.... it was so yummy... haha. One of my wonderful quote of the weekend: "Wow. This knife is really dull." I know it doesn't make sense, but that's why its an inside joke. ::big grin:: speaking of which, there were some fabulous quotes that came about this weekend, but those shall be shared at a later time :) After dinner we broke up into small groups again and had a larger talk about discernment. I really liked all the talks that we had this weekend... it helped me think a lot of things through and just de-stress in general... we relaxed for a few hours after the last small group. we just spent the time singing and chatting and we kept going outside to watch the lunar eclipse. My gosh, it was so incredibly beautiful. Since we were out in the sticks you could see the night sky so well and it was absoultely breath-taking. aaaa... To me that kind of beauty just reaffirms the existance of God to me. Later on that night we played a huge game of Scattegories which was a lot of fun... even though some people cheat (coughcoughVanessa). Overall, it was a great time of fellowship, relaxing, and strengthing our faith... I can't wait till the spring :)