Women's Retreat

This weekend I went on the Bridgepoint Bible Church Women's Retreat at Pine Cove Crier Creek. I'm glad I went, it was a good time to remind myself of God's love and goodness...

I stayed in a cabin with these lovely ladies! It was good to get to spend some time with them without our guys around.

We also got to do some fun things during our free time like shoot BB guns and bows and arrows and go on a horseback trail ride! 

(I was a pretty good shot...just sayin')

All fun things aside, the best part was being able to come together and worship and learn more about God. Worship was led by two girls who have a little band together called The Reliques. One of the girls just had a baby not to long ago and she brought her along this weekend. She was really cute.

The subject of the weekend was God's goodness through our times of suffering. It was sort of hard at the beginning for me to relate to this topic because I feel like I haven't had much suffering in my life...at least not the type of suffering that a lot of people go through like losing a loved one or going through a rough illness or losing a job, or anything like that.

But as I was talking to different people about it, they helped me to realize that sometimes, it's the little things that are hard in life that can make a person bitter and not willing to accept or see that God is still good, and I realized that I have gone through some hard things in my life so far, and there are areas in my life right now where I am struggling a little bit. 

It's really sad that the bad things in our lives overshadow the good things, and the truth is that there are way more good things in our lives than bad when you think about it. That's the wonderful thing about God - he is sovereign. He can show his goodness to us through the bad things that happen in our lives, but we have to be willing to see past those bad things and try to look at the bigger picture. God uses our struggles to teach us more about him and his glory.

I figured out that I like to not think about the little things in my life that I have a hard time with and how they really affect me. I get so busy sometimes that I don't ever stop to think about things like that. I just brush them off a lot of times, so it was good to really stop and try to think about some of the struggles I have and how I can start to see God's goodness in my life, and also how I can start to figure out what to ask others to pray for me about. 

Anyway, it was a good weekend. And now it's Monday, and I have to go back to work. I need to pray that God will keep the thoughts from the weekend fresh in my mind so I won't just go back to my life as if I haven't learned anything!