Making Room for God - During Retreat

HAPPY Tuesday Covenant Groupies,

We hope you had a fulfilling and powerful weekend. Kevin and I just returned from our 12th Annual Couples Retreat with our church. We are so ecstatic that we went; at one point we discussed not going. We welcomed two new facilitators, Eric and Carletta Yancy from Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They were truly amazing and insightful. They brought a new flavor, concepts, demonstrations and divine revelation. Kevin and I were excited that so much of what they brought to this retreat were sheer confirmations from God for us.

Since we’ve been at our church, the whole retreat experience is all we’ve known. I have seen and know of other people who’ve gone on retreats and done things a little different than how we do it. For example, initially I thought we were supposed to be truly alone with God and our spouse with the exclusions of technology and anything else that normally takes up a lot of our time. But, it’s never been that way for us.

Additionally, we thought it was so important to spend time with other couples; outside of just lunching and shopping together. As well, we needed to know what God had next for us in ministry.

So, this time I asked the Lord why were we going on this retreat, how different was it going to be and what He wanted from us during our time together? He quickly answered. The first thing that was going to be different was me leaving my phone home and I was not going to work during our breaks. Kevin had to bring a little work along, but it didn’t interfere with anything because he didn’t have to oversee anything. Kevin and I were going to spend serious quality time together. We spent valuable time with other couples sharing God’s Word and the value of marital accountability and finally, God revealed a few things that He’s doing in our marriage and ministry.

We’ve gone to the retreat for several years and it has been increasingly difficult for us to spend time together; we’d go out and spend all of our time with other couples, sometimes to the wee hours of the morning, do a little shopping or even catch up on some much needed sleep. All the while, we’re inadvertently denying ourselves much needed time together. Well, not this time.