In the book PRAYERFULLNESS by Robert Wicks, Christian Psychologist there is a chapter titled, Unscheduled or Unexpected Retreat where he shares the idea of how sometimes God plans some time for you to just be. The following is a series of five or six days when I experienced this first hand…

We had a staff retreat planned where we were going to have reflexology and relax and reflect. Instead it got postponed. I enjoyed a beautiful morning run on a new trail going to Happy Rock Park. I was also blessed with a broken dryer which lead to a phone call to my father-in-law because my husband is out of town. We had a nice visit. Then I walked to the park to share a picnic lunch with the people I work with. It turned out to be a very peaceful-retreat-like-day; feeling God’s presence with me.

Then the next day I took off to Denver to meet my husband for an anniversary trip. Really it was my husband saying, “I miss the mountains” trip. He was feeling bummed that he’d been out voted to go back to Colorado this summer for vacation. He said he felt the need to go because the last time we were in Colorado, we were only in Estes for about five hours, and he never gets to go on retreats or do fun things like I do with my job. Who am I to argue???

We hung out for four days, hiked 25.5 miles, enjoyed great mountain views, ate really good food, finished two books I’ve been wanting to read, “Heaven Is For Real” and “Messy Spirituality”.

I started reading “Heaven Is For Real” out loud to my husband on the way home from Minnesota after our Christmas visit. We tried to pick it up a couple of times at home but it never really worked. I brought it on a trip we took in February but we never got to it. We sat on the bed one afternoon after a hike while it snowed outside (in May) and read. It was really nice! We finished it on our last night, me reading while he made dinner. It was really good.

“Messy Spirituality” is a book I’ve had on my bookshelf for many years, actually about 10 years and haven’t read it! I got it when I went to a Youth Ministers Conference in Denver. So, it was ironic I was reading it on the plane on my way to Denver and finished it on our flight back. The whole premise of the book is that God meets us where we are at and you don’t have to be perfect or pray all of the time or be anything or anybody other than who God created you to be in order to be ‘worthy’ of God’s love, mercy, grace and forgiveness!

I think I really needed to keep the book on my shelf until this trip. I don’t know if I would have appreciated it as much because over the past 10 years I have grown so much in my understanding of God and the Church and of those God calls and whose who call themselves followers of God.