Well-Served

Last weekend, our family piled into our truck and made the one hour trip down to another mission's retreat center where we and all the other homeschool families were invited for the annual homeschool retreat. After two very busy and VERY stressful weeks for me, I knew that I, and probably the rest of the family, very much needed the getaway. Now, spending a long weekend with over 100 people, most of whom are near strangers to me, isn't exactly an introvert's idea of rest and relaxation, but I packed along my positive attitude and hoped for the best.

Due to limited cabins for such a large group, we volunteered to be one of the families who tent camped, which turned out to be perfect. We pitched our borrowed tent way out in the corner of the compound, a non-trafficked area behind another building where we had all the privacy we needed to settle in for 3 nights.

 Highlights from the weekend included the beautiful surrounding, excellent food, fun worship songs for family worship, talking with some friends in deeper conversations, and even playing some rowdy card games on the evening of the last night.

 One particular couple from Belgium, notorious for their creative large group games, challenged us (the whole group) to complete a long list of challenges in only one hour. If we accomplished them all, he promised to give us candy. If not, he would eat it all! Required activities, to be divided among everyone, included: 1000 sit-up/push-ups; saying 100 pleases and thank-you's; memorizing and reciting Colossians 3; drinking 20 liters of water; tying 100 knots; coloring a white sheet of paper completely black with an ink pen; coloring mustaches on 5 females with permanent marker; someone wearing 30 pieces of clothes for 30 minutes; and many, many more. Our family unit volunteered and successfully completed the "20 meters of clothes", where we tied together basically every piece of clothes we had brought for the 4-day retreat and presented it by stretching it lengthwise across the basketball court.

Micah, however, took home the grand prize when he volunteered for the bonus activity: have his head shaved to 3mm length and get "Belgium Gold" – that is, the world's finest chocolate (according to the Belgians)! So Micah, who had been wanting a haircut for some time, agreed, but his dad, yours truly, made a bit of a mistake. I set the borrowed shaver at 3, thinking of the #3 guard on our shaver at home. And rather than testing the length in an inconspicuous place, I ran it straight up the middle! Needless to say, we were all surprised, when that particular shaver's 3 setting was about 1mm, instead of 3mm. I reset the guard to 5 and finished the job, leaving an awful strip right down my son's head, a runway clear enough to be seen from 5000 feet elevation! 

Well, the mistake paid off in the end, as Micah was given two strips of Belgium Gold at the final ceremony. And hey the difference of 2mm won't be too bad in a week or two!

One of the most memorable things about the weekend was one of the most unexpected – a Chinese teenager named Charlie. 

Charlie was one of about 20 high school students from the Black Forest Academy (boarding school in Germany) who came down to Ethiopia to help with the kids' program at our retreat. These students (and their leaders) led Micah and Grace in their morning activities, a first for Grace as she stayed the whole time with her "class" all three mornings! 

Another one of the "jobs" of the Black Forest Academy students was to help families, especially at meal times. The very first dinner, Andrea and I waited in line, longing for, yet dreading the buffet table that lie ahead. How would the two of us get 4 plates of slippery spaghetti, 5 drinks, 8 pieces of silverware, and napkins off the buffet table, out the door, down the clumsy steps, and over to the picnic tables outside? The answer, it turns out, was Charlie. Although he wasn't necessarily assigned to us, Charlie sought us out each and every meal, offering us two amazingly helpful hands, delivering us safely to a table, and often running back inside for whatever we had forgotten. It may sound simple, but the burden that that took off of Andrea and me is really quite inexpressible. How many plates of food made it to the table that otherwise would have bitten the dust in route? There's no telling, but Charlie's service to our family definitely made the weekend just that bit more of a refreshment that both Andrea and I needed. And we praise God for that!