Floyd Church Adult Winter Retreat Part 1 - Storm before the Calm

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” - naah, sounds too much like a chiché .

“It was a dark & stormy night”. - not even close. It was too nice this weekend.

Here’s the basics. I attended my church’s annual Adult Winter Retreat this last weekend at the Springs Christian Camp near Gladwin, MI. That’s the easy part. The hard part is coming up with the spin to put on it.

Do I share how it was a life changing experience? About how I managed to sled down the hill around 10 times this year? About how I managed to look iky in front of my friends playing some silly game in the Friday night follies? Or do I share about my victorious conquest in this year’s Carpetball tournament?

Answer: No. Because none of it happened.

My main goal of the weekend was to relax for a while because that’s exactly what I needed, and that I ate a lot. That’s the spin this’ll take.

My workweeks start on Wednesday, and I knew right away something was up. I started to develop a case of the sniffles and started coughing and sneezing more. I knew I needed to shake this right away before Friday rolled around. Which, by the way, did not happen.

When I put in to take that Saturday off, I thought nothing of Friday night. I figured I’d end up working til 7 then go home, get my stuff together, feed the cat, then drive up there possibly catching some of the Friday night activities. That’s exactly what happened except 7:00 ended up being just past 8:30 because we were extremely busy. Oh, and did I mention that when I went to Burger King afterward to get a quick bite to eat that my order was goofed up.

Everything was settting itself up for a long evening.

I arrived by 11:15, the last to arrive for the night. The Friday night follies had long finished (which I could care less about anyway) and many had settled into their rooms for a short night’s sleep.

My mother had previously called me already and let me know that we would be rooming together. Another youth group was using the rooms we’d normally use separately and I guess that probably meant we’d be using one of the married couples rooms.

Much to my surprise when I dragged myself and my stuff in that the room we were using was roughly a couple hundred square feet in area more than that of my house. The bunks in the room were arranged in a way that it look like we had two separate huge rooms.

After visiting with a few people and getting settled in, I decided it was time for a long deserved bedtime. It was around 12:15am.