Girls and Boys Retreat

Thank you so much for all your prayers for our retreats this weekend. They both went really well. It's so funny to think about the activities of each and how different they are. At the girls retreat, we spent most of our time talking, crying, and doing a spa night. The boys went caving, and had dye wars (like paintballing but with waterguns filled with water with food coloring). Oh how different boys and girls are!

The girls retreat went really well. I have been praying about it a lot over the past two weeks. I knew that there were a lot of girls just suffering this year. So, on Friday night I shared my testimony with them and we watched the Rob Bell video "Rain." Then I gave the girls an opportunity to share "storms" in their lives. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it ended up being so good! Almost all of the girls shared something going on in their lives or something they struggled with. Needless to say, the kleenex came out and we all had a good cry. I think a lot of the girls just needed a night to be real and get it all out. After our 3 hour sharing time (we're girls... we like to talk!) we had a spa set up for them in one of the classrooms. We had the girls retreat here at school and one of our goals was to make it feel like a different place. So, we met in the library and transformed it into a living room with couches and lamps, we even covered up all the books! At the spa, we had candles everywhere and one of the other teachers and I gave massages and we had face masks and let them soak their feet. We also had a nail stations where they could do each other's nails. I think they really liked it! Our sharing time had gone so long, we ended up going to bed at 1 am. Saturady morning, we watched cartoons and had a morning devotional from one of the other teachers, then we had a question and answer time. The girls had written down questions for us the night before and put them in a basket. They got really into it! It was great! We answered questions for 2 hours and did not have time to go through the half of them. What was so neat is that we had 5 teachers there, all in a different season of life. We had a single woman, me: the young married without kids, another married woman with young kids, another married woman with older kids, and a woman with grandkids! How cool is that?! So, we had a great time answering questions! The retreat concluded with watching Enchanted. It was such a great retreat. I am so glad we did it. I LOVE when people get to the place where they can really be real with each other!

Boys retreat... umm I wasn't there, but it sounds like it went well. They had 3 sessions talking about sexual purity. One that the 3 seniors did, one where they watched the "Every Young Man's Battle" video, and one where Rob shared and had question time. They loved going caving and doing the dye war. My husband came home on Saturday night looking like this picture. It was quite the sight! Luckily, it all came off when he took a shower! I was a little worried that his face would be pink for a few days! Fortunately one of the male teachers that went took some pictures. So, here are some pics of both retreats (in the slideshow above)!