Thanksgiving

It's high time I sat down and wrote our Thanksgiving adventure. It's been high time for a while, and I'm glad to finally be writing it. Some pretty fantastic things happened, and I have pictures to prove it.

This year was the first year that both Dez and I were away from our families on Thanksgiving. We were together though, and as we start a new family, I think it was good to experience alternative ways of celebration before we settle in on particular traditions.

Now, on with the adventure....Desiree has a professor who has a husband who operates a retreat center up in the mountains. This professor, along with her husband, invited all the students that were unable to return home for the holiday to the retreat center to celebrate Thanksgiving together.

We were quite excited about this invitation; and, along with a car full of new student-type friends, (who, I might add, were quite entertaining on the 2+ hour trip) traveled high into the mountains. We traveled up from sea level to over 6000 feet if the road signs were to be trusted. Our ears played games with us, but our lungs leaped at the presence of the fresh air.

It was dark upon our arrival Wednesday night. We ate a late dinner of fantastic gourmet pizza, and proceeded to have a very encouraging conversation with the other students. To be more accurate, there was one man, the husband of one of the students, who was telling his story, and the rest of us were listening. There were maybe a dozen of us or so. Though I shan't do his story justice attempting it's retelling, I will try to summarize it:

His story was about how God called him to become honest with his life, and to go on a deeper journey with God using that honesty as a starting point, and his heart as a destination. I shall write about two things that stood out to me, though there were more. 1) How much faith we can have that God will finish his work in us, and how this faith overrules all our fruitless efforts at self-improvement. 2) How often (and how much) the church (specifically, the evangelical church) gets in the way of our growth process. With it's spiritually guised message of self-improvement and it's confusion and lack of experience with the actions of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, the church cannot help but hinder our spiritual formation. Of these two things, the first I found very encouraging, and the second very validating.

After the large group discussion broke for the night, we sat in the hot tub for a while. The water was a little too cold and the seats were a little too high, such that your chest was well above water. The mountain air was clear and clean, but chilled, and the effect of the hot tub was a blend of relaxation gone askew into frustration. What indeed is worse than a good thing gone slightly afoul? But I digress with exaggeration, perhaps, for it was not so unpleasant that we boycotted its pleasures.



Our room for the night contained two twin-sized beds. Me and Dez tried sleeping together in the same bed cuddled very closely together, but it was not working as well as we would have liked. We switched to separate beds, but after an hour or two we missed each other such that we couldn't sleep and we climbed back together in the same bed again. Then once more we would grow crowded, and separate, but then come together again, and so on and so on throughout the night. We didn't sleep as soundly as we had hoped for, but our antics amused us such that it didn't bother us as much as one would think.



The next morning we ate a marvelous breakfast, and then proceeded to hike about out in the woods. We had forgotten the elevation we were at, with the air thinner and such, but our excitement was great being atop mountains and surrounded by trees and rocks and other such things. We saw a deer. We saw a little lizard. We saw many songbirds that, though similar to those in the Midwest, were still quite different. I won't tell of all our adventures in the woods, but one discovery simply cannot be silenced! The pine cones were enormous! As big as our heads! It was perhaps the most surprising thing I have seen in California thus far.



Upon our return from the hike we ate the Thanksgiving meal, and then proceeded to have a little service. We packed our things and said our goodbyes and began the journey home. It was our first Thanksgiving together, and it was a good one.