RVR and Breaks!

I was able to be home for the past 9 days with it being Thanksgiving.  I never really knew how tired and warn out I was until I had a week of relaxing, sleeping in, and time with family and friends.  The week before break was kind of a crazy week.  We worked the weekend before and then instead of having two days off and chill time, we went on a retreat to River Valley Ranch in Manchester, Md.  Then when we returned back to Sandy Cove we had two days of classes and then a hard weekend of working.  So thinking back over the last two weeks, I have come to realize and appreciate the need for breaks.  I also realized how important it is for people specifically in ministries to make sure they spend time for themselves and take that time needed to rejuvenate.  If you do not take the time to rejuvenate, you are not going to be able to serve God with all you are worth, so He only ends up getting about half of what we are capable of doing. 

Anyway, our retreat to River Valley Ranch was good.  We had a mixture of class time, fun time, and team building fun. J  We got the chance to go horseback riding and on a 1700 ft zip line (my first zip line ever).  It was def. a crazy experience and a ton of firsts for a lot of us.  I had also never been on a horse other then when I was little and it was a pony and it went around in circles.  My horse was Duke and he was a well experienced horse been on many trail rides.  I did not even need to tell him when to turn or start or stop, he just kind of did his own thing and followed the guy in front of him.  It was kind of interesting when I would try to make him go in to the center of the path (cause he mainly stayed on the outside) it was almost like he was glaring at me saying “I know what I am doing”.  So half the time I just sat back and let him do what he wanted.  It was interesting trusting the horse that he knew what he was doing. 

I guess I learned a lot about trust that weekend (looking back).  Anyone who knows me really well knows that I am scared of heights.  But I figured out from a couple different activities that if I do it once I am fine then.  For the zip line, the first time I went I screamed the first time I went down and was terrified but then second time I went down I was able to look around and enjoy the scenery.

I am looking forward to what else God is going to teach me these next few weeks before we have our Christmas break!

Psalm 16:11

“You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever.”  Psalm 16:11 (NLT)

David writes in Psalm 16 about the joys and benefits of a live lived in companion with God.  The beginning of the chapter talks about the benefits now-a-day and the last couple verses talk about the eternal benefits.

In verse eleven, David has explains the secret to joy.  David finds “joy in [God’s] presence and the pleasure of living with [Him] forever”.  If our eyes are on God, our hearts will always rejoice in him.  The world is full of sorrow and thankfully in Heaven there is joy.  All of our earthly sorrow will end with Heavenly joy.  Death does not conquer us.  In verse ten it says “for [God] will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one to rot in the grave”.  I think these couple of verses are a great reminder that we have hope, when we are following Christ we will find great joy and we will live with God eternally in Heaven!!!!!!  

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star...

Every time I go to blog I sit in front of my computer for about ten minutes just trying to decide which learning moment I should write about.  There is always so many different things going through my head and different things I am learning through being here at Sandy Cove.  So if anyone has any specific questions for me just Facebook me. J

So our weekends can be pretty crazy.   Since that is when we have the majority of groups come in we tend to only work on the weekends.  Some weeks we have hard work schedules and others are a little easier.  Because there are six of us here we tend to rotate our schedules.  The one schedule that all of us seem to dread is the 6:30am shift in the kitchen on Saturday mornings.  Well this morning it happened to be Renee’ and me.  I know sometimes I have a hard time having a good attitude that early in the morning especially when my alarm goes off at 5:30 and we leave the house by 6:15 because we have to walk down to the lodge.  Let me tell you this specific morning it was so cold and so dark.  But as soon as we left our driveway we both looked up and we saw the most beautiful sky.  The stars were so bright and so defined that you could see so many constellations.  It felt and looked like it was 10 in the evening. There was no moon this morning but those stars…it is just hard to describe if you were not there.  It was really cool to see that even if most of the world was not up at 6 in the morning those stars still shine there as bright as they do during the evening.  Which reminded me how our God never sleeps and that even when we are asleep during the night he is still there watching us and protecting us.  Also, the God who created me and you is the same God that created those amazing stars.  That was my revelation from this morning walk to the kitchen.