The retreat effect

Ah, the post retreat season. Hmm. It's a good introduction, provided you know about the retreat and what it tends to do to me, but there's a good chance that some of the people reading this don't have any idea what's going on here. It may be time for a little background.

Every year, the church group I help out with does a confirmation retreat. We take a hundred teenagers out into the woods and show them what their lives are and where their selves, faith and families fit in. We spend about three months preparing for an event that takes up only three days. That's six meetings at an hour and a half a piece, plus four all night planning lock-ins coming in around six or seven hours of work each. If you do the math that's around 35 hours of planning. At the retreat itself, the confirmandi (participants) arrive around seven on Friday night and go to bed around midnight (in ridiculous theory). Breakfast on Saturday is at eight and again they go to bed around midnight (again, in our wildest dreams). Sunday breakfast is at eight again and we usuallly have the teenagers out and on their way home by twelve thirty. I bet you can see where I'm going with this: We spend 35 hours planning for an event that is scripted at 25 and a half. There's set up before and tear down after, and nobody ever listens to us when we tell them that they should really get some sleep tonight, tommorrow's going to be tough, but there you have it.

So what does this have to do with me personally? Well, start with the fact that it wears me out. Though we provide a generous slice of time for sleep, we don't get to do it until everyone in our cabin is at least pretending to do the same. I had a relatively good group this year; they were pretty well settled by two each night. I had to get up an hour before them each morning, but that's just how life is sometimes. I got in a total of eight hours of sleep all weekend and spent my waking hours working harder than I am accustomed to. Last night I went to bed at around six thirty and got up around seven thirty this morning.

Believe it or not, the exhaustion is really a secondary concern. Yeah, a lot of the people working that retreat had to go to work or school today, but really the effects of sleep deprivation wear off after a day or two. The really tricky bit is what's called the "retreat high". Without revealing the content of the retreat to possible future generations, I can say that we hold a mirror to these kids' lives, both the everyday and the whole span of it and show them that God really is beside them. By the time they head back to their cabins on Saturday night, half of them are in tears, and that emotion is contagious. Add to that the hope and the fear and the anticipation that the leaders get from trying to make sure that all of this works and doesn't fall apart in our hands and we end up a lot closer to our emotions than we are usually comfortable being.

I personally don't let my emotions show very often. It's not some psycological block or some need to feel safe or any other issue, I just seem to run colder than most people except for one week a year right after the retreat. That's when I have a tendency to send off half a dozen emails to people telling them how much I love them and miss them and am glad to be a part of their lives. The emotions are real, and they don't go away for the other fifty one weeks of the year, but I always feel like I should appologize afterwards for the shock. There is an event on the retreat that my friend Kurt likes to refer to as a bittersweet blessing: it's a beautiful moment that really and truely lets people know that they are loved here and now by the people that they see everyday. What makes it bittersweet is that while everything they learn in that moment stays true, it may not, and one might even say probably will not ever be experessed this clearly again. That's kind of what happens this week for me; I finally have the strength to say what I mean to say, but it will go away soon enough.

For those of you wondering about or fearing the approach of your own letter, don't worry. Darby seems to have taken the brunt of it this year; I'm definately slowing down after the hour and a half I spent writing to her this morning, but I'm not done yet. There are a few people I'd still like to contact specifically, and it doesn't seem like enough. The only link I know of to this page comes from my facebook page, and every one of my friends there is someone I know in the flesh, someone I have worked beside and talked with and laughed with. I can say unabashedly here to all of you that I do love you, and I'm glad to have you in my life.

Amen. So be it.