A Weekend Retreat

I'm still processing some things from this weekend, but it was nice, so nice, to get away.

We left Cory with my parents and went to Warm Beach for the Sacred Marriage retreat with Gary Thomas. Unfortunately we got off to a really bad start for our weekend. We missed dinner on Friday night (it was salmon) and then when we got to our room after the session we discovered that a) we had to make our own bed, which was a bit odd and b) they had left us with a full size fitted sheet for a queen size bed. Ugh.
Thankfully one of the other couples knew the camp and had the same problem so they went and raided the laundry room for some appropriate size sheets!

Obviously the premise of the weekend was to have time with your spouse and figure out how to get along better. I had heard about Gary Thomas before and really wanted to read his book, but I think it was good to get this intro with him in person. The tag line of his book is: What If God Designed Marriage To Make Us Holy More Than To Make Us Happy? His point being that marriage isn't easy, it takes work, and in the end it will work best if we focus on becoming more Christ-like.

There were quite a few couples who had been to this seminar before so he did an abbreviated summary on Friday night and then on Saturday one session each for the men and the women. Sunday morning was about forgiveness. Applicable to more than just marriage.

The food was amazing and Saturday night they had a chocolate fountain with all kinds of fruit and pound cake as well as a live pianist. That was really cool!

We left on Sunday and stopped at the outlet mall near Marysville. Even though we didn't have Cory with us we didn't forget about him... $100 later he has a new wardrobe in the next size of clothing that he will need sooner than I think! The kid is not even 2 years old and we bought all 3T clothing... yikes!

I needed a vacation from my retreat (I never sleep well in a new place) but it was really nice to have meals that didn't require cooling food and picking up after a toddler! Of course he had fun shoveling the snow at Grandma and Papa's house since ours is all gone!