Menno Goodness

This past week was exactly what I needed – a little bit of Mennonite goodness, complete with the feeling of being absolutely covered with community.

On Sunday, January 3^rd, we headed down to Shelly Beach (the actual name of the town) to participate in the Mennonite Retreat for all the Mennonite workers in the country. Although this was a time to debrief with one another and to process what God is doing in this cross-cultural setting, it was a whole lot of fun. Since I don't have any specific stories, I thought I would just make a list again of all the highlights.

The Skogheim Christian Conference Center was a pretty sweet place. It was just a "typical" camp center but the property was large enough that I went running almost every morning! Okay, so I hate running, but I have been working on that – or I was until I came here and became a captive to the BCI property. So it was good to get back out there and actually exercise once again.

Okay, I have to give the food its own category because it was great. We always had two-three courses, even at breakfast. The soups at this place were so excellent. Plus, sometimes we would just sit around the tables long after supper was cleaned up and just chill and talk, which is one of the things I miss the most about Bluffton, so it was good to do that again.

Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed the debriefing time we had together. Usually our talks were just in the mornings and sometimes in the evenings, so they weren't too long. But it was helpful to hear what everyone else's perspectives were about experience God in a different culture, especially since all these MCC/MMN people all knew what they were doing. We were given a space to share our experience as well, and even though that meant I cried a lot, it was still really good to get things off my chest.

Since we only had things in the mornings and the evenings, we had free time all afternoon! So we spent our time hanging out by the pool, playing Dutch Blitz and Ultimate Frisbee, and taking great naps.

Also included in this retreat were the MCC SALTers (who are generally around our ages and are working with different organizations in South Africa for about the same time period). They were a great group of people, and even though they loved to have long talks about hockey (they were all Canadian), they were still a lot of fun.

Hymns!! Hooray for singing hymns again. Ask me about this and I will just start smiling. It was so good for my soul (plus, it wasn't Hillsong, so what more could I ask for?)

Shelly Beach is, of course, a coastal town, so one day we did nothing but packed up and headed to the ocean. It was insanely windy, so much in fact that most people didn't last there very long. Regardless, going to the beach is always a highlight for this kid who grew up in Illinois.

One afternoon we were supposed to go "hiking." Instead, we a bunch of us opted to go to this used bookstore we saw in town. So we all came back to Skogheim with lots of books (mostly Agatha Christie's for me) and frozen yogurt we got at this crazy place called "Clementine's"

Our retreat really ended Saturday morning after breakfast, but someone we decided to drag it out as long as possible. After checking out we all hung around in the parking lot forever, while we waited for the MMN people to talk about some "official business" and James went uptown to get his tire fixed. When we finally did leave the conference center, we MMN people decided to prolong the ending even more. We headed to the mall and ate lunch at RJs (thanks to MMN). So we definitely milked this for all it was worth.

Well, those are the highlights. I know being Mennonite is way more than something that is "ethnic," but it's unreal how much connection I feel with this community, even when I don't even know the people very well. I am especially grateful for all the support that all the MMN/MCCers continue to give us day after day. This retreat definitely highlighted that for me.

And tomorrow we head back to work, which is going to be unbelievably hard. BCI has seemed to become even more intense in the few days that we were gone and I like being on holiday for roughly 3 weeks.

Oh well, I guess all good things must come to an end.