High School Guys Retreat

We began our high school guys retreat last night. We're doing a few of these throughout the year, taking 7 or 8 guys (Jess is doing a similar thing with the girls) for a weekend. Throughout the weekend, we do multiple hour-long devotionals, centered around the idea of what it means to be men and followers of Jesus. A cool part of this for me is that these 8 guys have been a part of our youth group since 6th grade, all of them are now in High School.

We started off at 6, went grocery shopping en-mass, picking up all kinds of junk food for the weekend. We picked up pizza and headed out to Brad's cottage just in time to catch an amazing sunset. We started off watching parts of the movie Gladiator ("Do you like Gladiator movies, son?") and then we started off looking at King David and what made him the man that he was. We focused a lot on how we see ourselves, how we think others see us and how God looks at us as men. The first night a retreat like this can be a tough one to get their attention with something like this for a lot of reasons, but during the hour and a half we went through this stuff they were engaged, vulnerable and went deep, really laying some stuff out there that suprised me. A good chunk of the time was spent journaling on the questions and then talking about what we put down.

Enough serious stuff, we decided we need to go on a mission - from God? At about midnight, we headed out to the store and bought about 1,000 forks. The woman at Kroger's had no idea why, and you may not either. Here's why:

We headed over to our Pastor's house and proceeded to cover his entire front lawn with all of these forks. It looked great, only wish we had more. Since I'd been traveling all week, I wanted to head home to hang with the family. I'm heading back later this evening to finish things out.

We were supposed to go to the Renissance Festival today, but Nate and Maddie are sick, and Emily's on her way to being sick. The kids were up early, Cath let me sleep in. We've been hanging out, having a lazy Saturday morning today.