Well, today is Wednesday, April 9, and I finally have the energy to summarize and review the Beach Retreat weekend that we just had.
As we were preparing for the bus ride down, we had some fairly ominous weather. This is the same day that quarter-sized hail fell early in the morning that we were supposed to be headed to the beach. Needless to say, I was a little worried about the weather. But, we pushed on with packing our supplies and running those last minute errands, and low and behold the sun started to peek its head out. The bus arrived just in time for the weather to be perfect for a beach trip!
The bus ride was a lot of fun! We all rediscovered our love for the time-honored children’s film “The Little Rascal’s”. There were numerous recurrences of the question: “How long til we get there?” followed by the response: “10 minutes” regardless of whether we were 3 hours away or 3 minutes away. I like to keep the suspense going. We made it to the ferry in record time, and loaded our bus on the opposite side from about 12 cars (I need to cut back on the snacks). Then we arrived at Port Royal to find that we were like the 9th bus to arrive in the last hour and had to wait for an hour to unload the bus. This meant that we had to throw out our original plan to have some program time on Friday night (of course, so we could go swimming). But, in youth ministry, adaptation is the name of the game.
We all slept in on Saturday morning and headed to the pool after a healthy breakfast of pop tarts and cinnamon rolls. This is where we had some unpleasant and unfortunate events take place. I want to fully explain what happened so that the rumor mill is stalled as much as possible. We were gathering by the pool to split into groups to stay at the pool and to go to the beach. We were still waiting on a couple of the rooms to gather, when several of the students decided to go to the beach without an adult. We had told them to wait to go to the beach until there was an adult. They went (from their explanations, expecting an adult to be right behind them) down to the beach and got in the water. Several of the adults realized that they were missing from the pool, and learned that they had gone to the beach. The adults got down to the beach to find those students in the beach. Unfortunately for those students, this was a rule that we set out at the beginning of the retreat as being an automatic removal from the trip. Those five students were asked to call their parents and arrange a way to be picked up early.
It was a very difficult position for me to be in, because in reality it was a fairly benign set of events that occurred. But, the real problem lies in the possibility. 5 students went to the beach where they easily could have gotten lost in the hundreds that were in the immediate area. Also, the undertow was very strong that day, and there was the possibility of harm befalling one of our students. I NEVER want to remove or ban any student from one of our events, but the liability that ultimately rests on my shoulders is so great that I couldn’t possibly ignore this blatant disobedience. We had lost trust in those students ability to obey the rules which was distracting us from our responisibility to the safety of the other students. It is possible that another solution could have been reached, but this is what the three main chaperones came up with. Our hope though, is that the five students involved will see that there were no personal feelings involved in the making of our decision, and it had nothing to do with our opinion of them as people (which is extremely high of each of the five). We had to be objective and decisive so that the remaining students were safe and looked after. We want all five of them to come back and enjoy the many youth offerings for years to come.
Now that that has been addressed, the rest of Saturday was phenomenal!!! The weather could not have been better for a day at the beach! There were cloudless, sunny, blue skies and the water was comfortably cool. The pool was the perfect temperature to cool off. We finished the afternoon off with some intermittent viewing of the Final Four basketball games and barbecuing of hamburgers (courtesy of Jim Todd, Chef extraordinaire). After dinner, one last trip down to the beach was in order. After the beach, we gathered in the meeting room for some programming.
The central theme of the weekend was “Peace! Be Still!”. We examined the story of Jesus calming the storm from the Gospel of Mark. We learned that, because the Bible is the “Living Word of God”, the storm represents our fears, inadequacies, concerns and troubled times. The activity that we had planned was to decorate the back side of some small canvases that had been pre-painted black with magazine clippings or paintings of things that we could describe as “our storm”. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to that, but we did get to decorate “our calms”, or the things that help us get through or ride out our storms. The lesson connected with many of the students and we learned about the calming power of Christ’s love in our lives.
We awoke Sunday morning to the Holy Eucharist celebrated by Perry Todd. She did a wonderful job, as did the students that helped read and recite the prayers. Of course, I also have to give a big shout out and thanks to our powerpoint princess Bill Netherton who advanced those slides with the greatest of precision. He used such precision that it towered over the precision guitar skills displayed by myself (that’s right, I botched at least one of the songs so bad that I gave up half way through and said simply “that’s enough of that one”). But, all in all, it was a very nice and appropriate way to end the weekend.
The bus ride home was mostly uneventful due to sheer exhaustion, with the exception of the constant chanting requesting “LIT-TLE RAS-CALS” to be played on the bus movie screens. I guess you can never have too much of a good thing.
”He woke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be Still!’ Then the wind ceased and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe…” - Mark 4:39-41
