Feats of Strength and Courage

It was a thoroughly exciting weekend as Adam and I went on the Men's Retreat.

First off, it was raining cats and dogs when we drove up Friday night. Big cats and dogs. Huge cats and dogs. So many cats and dogs that it was impossible to see anything in front of us. I had to hold a stick out my window and tap along the road to make sure we didn't run in to anything. And dark, too! What with the grey, overhanging clouds and the fact that it is, technically, still winter, there wasn't much in the way of light going on. And the headlights just couldn't compete.

Nevertheless, we got there, finally. My eyes were all kinds of tired by the time we rolled into the parking lot at the camp. The parking lot which was, oddly enough, a mud-pit. Six to eight inches deep. It made for some interesting driving. Or sliding. Whichever.

The Subaru, being an all-wheel drive, handled it fine, of course. Some of the other cars, not so much. Luckily, though, we didn't have to pull out ropes and winches. Everyone managed to find a spot to stop. And change into boots. And slog through the mud to carry in all our stuff.

Got to the door of the dining hall and we were all instructed to "take off your shoes!" In very loud voices. By the guys who had gotten there early only to discover that mud and carpet don't mix.

Those of us who had managed to get all our stuff in one load did as instructed; those of us who still had stuff out in the car had to toss our bags into the room as far as possible and then head back to get more.

And those of us who had a son attending, as I did, were able to have him take off his shoes and carry our stuff into the sleeping area and claim our bunks while we went back out to the car to get the rest of the stuff.

After we got everything in, we spent Friday evening just hanging out, playing games, eating snacks - typical guy stuff. Adam and I found a group of guys willing to play Bang! so we had some fun with that. Then Adam went over to the Risk table while I played a few games of euchre with some native Michiganders.

For those of you who might not know, euchre is kind of the state card game of Michigan. Everyone here receives their first euchre deck when they are born, and are proficient by the time they are a year old. It's also part of the elementary school entrance exam. They tried for years to make it part of the driver's test as well, so anyone moving to the state would be required to learn it, but that didn't pass because they couldn't figure out how to play the game while driving (although many Michigan drivers must be trying, as evidenced by the swerving on the highway).

As a non-native, and a non-competitive person, it was a joy to be with fellow Christians who tolerated my inability to play a simple game of cards. They handled it very well, even my partner, who kept mumbling something under his breath and cracking his knuckles while trying hard not to tear the cards in half out of sheer frustration.

Unfortunately, my eyes were very tired and my brain was still reeling from the strain of driving through blinding rain, so I had to quit after only a couple rounds and go to bed. The guys gave me a little cheer as I went; not sure if that was to congratulate me for having played the game with them, or for having left.

There wasn't much sleep to be had that night, sad to say. Some people, in their haste to pack for the retreat, had forgotten their BreatheFree nose strips, and so were unable to restrain themselves from snoring. And I'm not talking 'light' snoring here. I'm talking serious grizzly-bear, deep-winter, full-throated shake-the-walls-and-rattle-the-windows snoring. The kind that can lift a man from his bed at a distance of fifteen feet.

Needless to say, coffee was a very popular beverage the next morning.

Our Saturday activities were nearly a dream come true for Adam. Lots of games. In fact, most of the day was taken up by the games. Or, The Games, as it were. There was euchre (of course!), basketball, bean-bag toss, Wii bowling, and one other one which escapes me. We were organized into Teams, and each team had to appoint representatives for each type of game. Naturally, I was appointed as one of the euchre players. (Strange but true: my partner and I were the only ones who had any exposure at all to euchre on our team. Our team was all non-natives, obviously!) Adam was on the Wii bowling team.

So we spent the day playing games, winning some, losing some. Well, my partner and I didn't actually win any, but Adam did. He seemed to enjoy himself. As for myself, a completely non-competitive, non-confrontational person, it wasn't the most enjoyable experience ever, but it was a lot of fun to be with friends and enjoy them enjoying it.

We also had lessons interspersed throughout the day, focusing on the duty of men to lead at home and in the community, to protect and to serve, to love our wives, to train up children in the way they should go, to serve as examples, to be strong and courageous, and to remain, above all, devoted to God.

The speaker for the afternoon/evening was a guy from this Feats of Strength group who spoke to us about his experience growing up in a bad home and going to jail for armed robbery and finding Jesus in jail and turning his life around and becoming an evangelist and going around the world performing these stunts (tearing phone books in half, bending steel rods into pretzels with his teeth, breaking baseball bats over his back, that kind of thing) to show people that God wants his followers to be strong and courageous, and wants them to make a difference in the world.

It was all very impressive. By the time he was done, sometime after dinner, we were all excited and pumped up and cheering and ready to go out and take on the world.

Then we looked outside and noticed that it had been snowing all day long and there was a bit of a blanket of snow on the ground.

And then we noticed that the sidewalks were not covered with snow, but covered with a nice little layer of ice.

And then we noticed, as we were packing up our stuff and taking it out to our cars (after cleaning up the dining hall and the sleeping areas), that the roads looked a bit slick. And there was lots of fog out there.

And we packed up the cars and slogged through the muddy parking lot to get to the road which was covered with fog and ice and joined the long caravan of cars which was slowly inching its way across the rolling farmlands towards the highway at a rate which would guarantee our arrival no earlier than Sunday morning (!).

And then the fog lifted a bit and we were able to drive just a little bit faster so that it appeared we might make it home by midnight.

But still we drove very carefully, because there were numerous accidents, slide-offs and fender-benders all along the way, and our hands were white-knuckled across the steering wheel, which was so very nearly like the drive out (except trading ice for blinding rain) that all the joy and excitement of the weekend was nearly drained out of our minds by the time we arrived (safely) at home.

But we still had enough left to tell the family what a wonderful time we'd had, and how amazing the feats of strength and courage had been, and how completely and utterly exhausted we were.

It is so nice to be home again. For my next feat of strength and courage, I'm going to crawl into bed and see how much sleeping I can catch up on, sans snoring.