Escape

Junior High Winter Retreat

January 7-9, 2010, 17 junior high students from First Church and New Life escaped to Timber-Lee Camp for a winter retreat. We played broomball, held snakes, tubed down a hill covered in snow, and went tobogganing.  The weather was cold, the wind strong but that did not keep many people from enjoying the winter sports. To take shelter from the wind and cold we played some Suckers…spoons with tootsie pop suckers cause we didn’t have spoons. A couple rounds of catch phrase during dinner, and cards later in the evening. While the fellowship was great among the students and leaders, lots of laughs and inside jokes, the main session and breakaway times allowed for opportunities to question and discover more about who God is, why He sent His son to earth so many years ago. The theme verse was Isaiah 61:1b “He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.” We spent some time talking about heaven and what Jesus is saving us from Friday night. Saturday morning Dave, our speaker encouraged us to have some JAM time (Jesus and Me time). He shared with us what it means to have JAM time, which it can be a time of reading the Bible, a time of talking to God, and sharing with him all that is going on in your life, to talk to him like you do your best friend. Saturday evening, Dave continued talking about escaping and more specifically escaping the things around us that are keeping us from God. Sunday morning Dave closed by talking about what our groups would look like if we were living to “bring Heaven to earth”, what a difference our groups can make if we love one another, even those who are hard to love at times. 

Are you still taking time to escape into the Word of God? To escape into God’s presence? Remember not only the fun times you had on the ice or tubing hill, or the laughs over silly things that in another setting would not be funny or make sense. But remember what God was saying to you over the weekend through your friends, through the speaker, through the leaders. Remember what you learned about God and how Jesus came to save you.