Looking Forward After Our Retreat

If you’ve been following along with our blogs and newsletters recently, you know a bit about the stay-at-home planning retreat Carol and I experienced last week. It was a great way to take stock of where we’ve been over the last year, and where we’d like to go in the year ahead.

One of the questions we ended up asking ourselves was “What happened to the quiet time we had together each morning?” For most of the last year, we spent 15 to 30 minutes each morning reading, talking, praying - call it our own personal style of starting the day with a Creator Connection. Sometime earlier this summer, that time together disappeared. Naturally, we threw some guilt around and blamed most of it on my family showing up for an extended visit  (Sorry guys). Maybe someday I’ll reach a stage where I don’t feel the need to blame anyone at all for such things.

As I write this, it is the Monday morning after our planning retreat. It was so nice to start that Creator Connection habit once again. Just a short little micro church moment.

The first time I heard the phrase micro church it was in conjunction with what my family was doing in the beginnings of Covid a few years back. With the doors of the church closed, they had chosen to meet at my sister’s house, with Laurie at the piano for a brief time of quiet worship, prayer, and scripture; then a word of encouragement and spiritual challenge, most often from my brother Kevin. This time was always preceded by a very warm and natural time of family greeting and fellowship, as any family might do after enduring a week apart during a pandemic; the “worship” was then followed by more fellowship and a meal, ordered out, picked up, and brought back to the house, since there was no “dining in” going on in the world at that point.

After that Sunday gathering, they would each return to their regular weekly schedule, which seemed very irregular at that stage of the pandemic, and try to live out the gospel message, the “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” message, as they had heard it, preparing their hearts to return again the next Sunday.

When I hear the phrase micro church, I think of microcosm: a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger.

In the days before our retreat, I was reading the book In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, where author Henri Nouwen writes “What decisions have you been making lately and how are they a reflection of the way you sense the future?” He answers his question with the statement “Somehow I have to trust that (the Creator) God is at work in me, and that the way I am being moved to new inner and outer places is part of a larger movement of which I am only a very small part.”

As Carol and I move forward with Grow Me a Story, we are being “moved to new inner and outer places” by cultivating the creativity that has been placed inside of us. As we grow and change, we look forward to continuing to meet with you along the way. Thanks for joining us in this microcosm where we celebrate creativity.

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Consider the Henri Nouwen question: “What decisions have you been making lately and how are they a reflection of the way you sense the future?” Feel free to share your thoughts with our community.

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