Mighty Musk Ox Warrior Princess

Ok, I'm just back from Women's Retreat at Thousand Pines. Our theme was Revive: Body, Soul and Spirit and our speaker was a lady named Donna Partow. I had thought that this was going to be one of those "Kumbahya, let's focus on Jesus for a weekend" sort of retreats and I must say though that I was totally unprepared for what ensued. While I won't go in to all she spoke about, her focus was to call women to action and revival, to be like musk oxen (see here for a description of their defensive behavior towards the weak and young). She really challenged us to be a participant in what God is doing, not to be distracted by life's events and to realize that we are responsible for our responses to them. For free-time, some of the ladies did the confidence course and zip line as you can see in the flickr photos below. The comments I heard from my fellow TFB women concerning this weekend were overwhelmingly positive.

After the retreat, Laura and I drove over to my house at Lake Arrowhead and took some pictures of the beautiful spring flowers also posted on flickr.

Our Women's Retreat - The Chocolate Boutique

I just noticed that I forgot to post on the TFB Women's Retreat we had last week at Pinecrest(probably because there was too much insanity at work this week). I mentioned last fall that we were doing Group's Chocolate Boutique: Where Women Taste and See That the Lord Is Good. This retreat-in-a-box format was new for us -normally, we have a speaker at a program camp like Forest Home or every other year we plan our own hotel retreat. This year we were unable to go to Forest Home and so we had to scramble to come up with our own in less than 5 months.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was the Director of the retreat which meant recruiting the various leaders of the breakout sessions -the boutiques, crafts, worship, Big Group sessions and small groups. That turned out to be easy since we had an incredible team that volunteered for everything without me asking them. The facility was great, especially the food and I know that the ladies had a wonderful time. Our Worship Team of Karla, Casie and Laura did an excellent job all weekend. I liked how it spread the tasks out among so many different women -we had 14 total on the Design Team and it allowed for a variety of women to exercise their talents and spiritual gifts. Most of the women in attendance preferred the small group format to a lecture-style speaker although some thought it was a bit too light on Bible teaching. A couple of them thought I should've assigned a mandatory one hour quiet time before free-time (I guess 20 minutes of prayer and meditation by yourself in the prayer boutique was not enough.) Some complained it was too much like a Children's VBS (probably because we do Group's curriculum for our VBS too). Of course, they all liked eating chocolate. Whether or not this will have lasting spiritual impact, it is to early to see.

I posted a picture of the ladies here. You can see more down on my flickr banner at the right margin.