The Retreat that Refreshed

The time away with the women employees and wives of employees last week-end was refreshing and fun! It was refreshing to get off campus and away from the usual home/college duties and hear teaching directed toward us women. It was fun to get to know the women better and to do camp chores, prepare an "item," and experience electives sessions together .

The theme of the week-end was "bloom where you are planted (kamap gutpela long hap yu stap, in pidgin) . It was mostly a pidgin-speaking time. Hearing the teaching and the discussion that followed helped me to identify the needs of the national women more clearly.

We were assigned to huts like Jeff pictured below. Ours had eight women assigned to it. All of us had brought sleeping pads, sheets, blankets, or whatever we thought we'd need (and we had to carry them about a half-mile up a hill). There were three sleeping platforms in our hut, so five women slept on their sleeping pads on the floor. I offered to be one on the floor, but since I was the oldest woman, I was told to enjoy one of the sleeping platforms. And I did!

Our hut had kitchen duty first. We cut up vegetables together and cooked rice in a huge cast iron pot over an open fire. Conversation flows more easily when doing something, so the KP (kitchen patrol) time was enjoyable together with my hutmates. There were 21 women in attendance for the week-end.

One of the fun things was an elective on worship dance. A young gal showed us how to use a tambourine to praise the Lord in song. We laughed and had fun trying to learn what she was showing us.

On Saturday, we were given time to prepare items, as they call them. Each hut was to ready a song, poem, skit, or whatever we thought would illustrate the teaching we had heard. One hut did a funny skit about following a leader (according to their own drumbeat). Ours did a creative one about a flower God planted in a forest setting. After the skit we sang "In the Garden," that I had taught to the group in my hut. The women were touched to sing the words, "And He tells me I am His own."

When I got home on Sunday, Jeff had arranged some flowers from our garden as a remembrance of our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. They're beautiful, aren't they! This week-end Jeff and I will get away for a night in Hagen for our anniversary.