Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Craig, I hope you're reading this and that you started singing that song in your head after you read the title...

So, I'm back at the ranch. And it was an incredible few days at the coast. I feel so good and so excited about this year now that we've had this time together. But, let me start at the beginning.
We left Sunday immediately after work and we were all exhausted. It had been a long day because we had to do All Clean before we left. But we got it done and it's always fun working together.

On the way there, I road in Jen's car with Jen, Kristen and Mandi. It was a really great drive. We talked the whole way and it was so good to get to know Jen better. Even though we've been working with her and she's been a lot of fun, I hadn't felt like I had been really connecting with her. But I think that I just needed to realize that all the other interns that were here before us left literally 3 days before we came. So this has been a really hard transition for Jen and everybody, just like it has been for us. But we had a ton of fun in the car and I now feel really comfortable around her. Which is good because she's one of our small group leaders.

We got to Breakaway around 11:30 and they had snacks out for us and our beds turned down. It's a great place, right on the coast, small and rustic. They have middle school camps there during the summer, but it only holds like 65 people. They have 3 people on staff there, Jeff, who runs it, Suzanne, who is in charge of housekeeping and helps in the kitchen, and Spencer, who runs the kitchen and did the internship at Wildhorse a couple years ago. They were all great.

We crashed that night and woke up early for breakfast the next day. After breakfast, we had some time to worship and then we had 2 and a half hours of solitude time to create some goals for ourselves for the year and to think about what we want out of the year. It was wonderful. I went and sat on the beach for two and a half hours, which was incredibly beautiful and peaceful. However, everyone left me because I had wandered a ways down the beach and I got lost for like half an hour walking back. But, I made my back and all was well.

After lunch, we did some team- building exercises which I thought were going to be nerdy, but ended up being really sweet. We had some great discussions about communication and how to respect one another. And some cheesy get-to-know you stuff. Can't beat it.

After that, we went back inside and Rich told us that we now had another 2 and a half hours before dinner and our mission was to create a mission statement for ourselves and develop some non-negotiables that we all want to follow. We ended up spending the entire 2 and a half hours on our mission statement. It was really cool to see how important everyone thought it was. We all wanted it to be perfect and to represent each one of us and how we were going to spend the year. It was also really cool because we spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted to live while we're out here. Ben, our property manager, keeps telling us that this program is designed to give us a year that will be completely different than any other year of our lives. We've decided to really challenge ourselves. We want to create a community where we love each other well, where we share life and challenge each other. We talked a lot about calling each other out on stuff. And people were really honest about saying that they've heard a lot of this before and it hasn't happened. I know that that is true but I feel like this is the best opportunity we have to learn a lot of these lessons because there are people around us to hold us accountable to it and because we all are in agreement. It's going to be really sweet.

So, we got through the mission statement with only one fight and then we had dinner. After dinner, we had worship again and then we went bowling! It was so much fun! I did pretty well, but mainly it was just fun time with our whole group taking over this random bowling alley. After bowling, we went back to breakaway and hung out. There was a pretty intense ping pong tourney and then we all turned in.

Yesterday, we had worship after breakfast again and then Chris, Rich's wife, shared with us and challenged us to think about what we want to give up this year and what kind of habits we want to develop. After that, we had more time to work on our non-negotiables. We came up with some sweet stuff, although it's hard to get 14 people to agree on something. Still, it was good.

After lunch, Rich talked to us for a while and then we met with our small groups for the first time. It was really great because we decided to set the tone of honesty from the first moment. We got some stuff out on the table that we were already struggling with in the house. I think it's going to be hard, because we have a lot of very different people with very strong opinions and personalities. But I think the more we get to know each other, the better it will be. We're all reading Celebration of Discipline in our small groups so it will be sweet to talk about that with everyone as well.

After small groups, we had free time to go into town. We went into Astoria, where we went up in this lighthouse that was pretty cool. And then we went to cannon beach, where I tried some marrionberry ice cream and also tried some huckleberry ice cream, which I had never had before and the northwesterners seemed to think was a sin. They were both very good. We then saw the haystack, which is this weird huge rock out in the ocean that looks like a haystack. Then we headed back and had dinner.

After dinner, there was more worship and then a sweet game of apples to apples. Love it. We woke up this morning, had breakfast, cleaned up and headed back to the canyon. We had a good car ride back as well. Jen and Jeff decided to take us up Mount Hood (the other cars went the shorter, more boring way). We stopped in Sandy, OR and had the best wood-fire pizza ever and then went up and over Mount Hood where we stopped and played in some awesome snow.

Then, after a couple more hours of Disney songs and random 90s mixes, we were back at the Canyon. It's good to be back and we get the next couple of days off, which is sweet. I love getting paid to go on an awesome retreat. Forget paying 50 bucks for the leader retreat!

I also really ridiculously miss you all. If you get a chance tonight or tomorrow, I'll probably be in my condo, so you could call. If I'm not here, that means I headed into town, in which case you could call me on my cell phone. Doesn't that work out so well?

I love you all!