Soul Food

Last weekend our church went away for a retreat. Being one of the rare times that I leave Sydney (actually, it was in the area of greater Sydney but felt like the country) it is certainly blog-worthy but I have been avoiding posting about it because it is sooo painful to upload photos. The process threatens to be even worse this week because we're on dial-up speed until the end of the month.
I decided that tonight was the night to post, I washed up, got the camera and settled down .......and the battery in the camera is flat. When a Salvation Army (my denomination) function suffers a glitch it is traditional to sing a song while someone works furiously to fix the problem........so let's have a song, will we?

And on to plan B: the text only version.

Last Friday I left work early to come home and get organised for a weekend away, it took me an hour & a half to get the four kids to shower, and some more hours to do the washing, pack the clothes etc.
Finally, we were ready. We detoured to my brother's place where we had a enormous and excellent chocolate cake in celebration of Dimples' 12th birthday and my niece's 3rd.

We drove an hour and arrived at the retreat just in time for the first official event of the weekend: a short introduction to the theme and supper.

Accomodation was in bunk-rooms, I shared with five other women all of whom were twenty or so years older than me. It was a delight to be the annoying "young" thing, last to sleep and last to wake, made me feel like a teenager or something.

We had three casual sermons over the weekend and there were a couple of unique prayer activities. Saturday afternoon was very chilled free time. We hung out chatting, reading newspapers, sleeping, playing cards ......and the truly idiotic jumped into the ice covered swimming pool. It's remarkable that humanity has spent so much effort in creating comfortable environs and people choose to swim in icy water. Beats me.

There was a rather large bonfire on Saturday night and I think that will become the iconic collective memory of the retreat.
I will remember the freezing temperatures, the afternoon sun of late winter, young people playing football, constantly available filter coffee ( a winner in my book), the blooming wattle and a bucket labelled "emu" where food scraps were collected for the resident birds.