Mommy!

Jess: This weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to go to the Rejoice (my home church) Women’s Retreat in New York. It was great to be able to see some of the women I’ve known for so long, and I really appreciated the chance to spend time with them as an adult. It was an amazingly uplifting experience, and I hope to get the chance to go again in the future. Not only did I have a great time hearing about some powerful, influential women in the Bible, but I was spiritually renewed, as well. Plus, all the women who have known me since I was a kid gave me wonderful support as I pursue my call to ministry. I was really impressed at their ability to treat me like an adult. I know it’s tough to do that when you’ve known someone since they were a kid. It was definitely something I needed, since I am at a pretty interesting point of my journey.

Although the spiritual side of the retreat was absolutely fantastic, it was also a great time to see my mommy. We haven’t really had a lot of time to just hang out since I started college, so I really enjoyed having a couple of days to just talk with her about our lives. It reminded me that actually seeing people is so important and makes such a difference. Sometimes I just need a hug from my mom, and it was nice to get a few extra this weekend to last me through till Christmas. Despite the lack of sleep throughout the weekend, the laughter and stories were fantastic!

Well, that was the big highlight of my life this last week. Now I have to rewrite my sermon for Sunday (Wes decided he’s working too hard :-P) because I realized that I wasn’t going to preach the message God wants me to. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to say, but I know I wasn’t going in the right direction. And I think Wes survived the weekend pretty well without me; he even managed to clean the house! It was great to come home and not have to worry about that. Everyone who has ever been on a retreat knows that the return to “real life” is a pretty difficult one. Between the eight hour drive and not having to cook, clean or do laundry when I got home, I think I had a pretty nice transition between retreat and life, and I’m ready to share my excitement with others!

Wes:

So, my friends, I've been really impacted by all of the suicides that have been happening throughout the nation. It is horrible that we as a church are not standing up and showing love to those who feel so alone that they feel the only way to escape the oppression is to kill themselves. I preached on this on Sunday, sharing with my congregations the story of one of the victims, Tyler Clementi, who was a student at Rutgers, not 45 minutes away from us. I was very impressed by both church's response to this. Everyone that came up to me afterward was very moved by it and wanted to know how we can better minister to the people around us who need to know that the church is a place of love and safety. I told them in my sermon something that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in one of his sermons: if we passively allow evils to happen, we are cooperating with that evil and we might as well be a participant in it (this is paraphrased). The churches said they didn't want to passively sit back and let it happen, so in the future, we will be having conversations about what we as a church can be doing. I am very impressed with them and their willingness to love, not judge, those who need it the most.

I didn't get to go to any special retreat this last weekend. Instead, I had to chill at the house by myself. I got loads of stuff done, though, and I battled against aliens on Halo:Reach. I also had time to think about one of my papers this semester. Two of my classes' grades are solely based on one paper (per each of course). For my class on Reinhold Niebuhr and MLK, I am seriously considering writing my paper on their work (mainly MLK's) that corresponds with the Theology of the Cross. I am excited about this, and I need to get to work on it because I don't want to end the semester with two enormous papers and no time to do either. I have no idea what I'm doing for the other one, though...

I also started a Twitter account. Yeah, I know, lame. But I did it for a class. One of my professors assigned it as a way to work on writing more concisely. My name is pstrwes, and I've been using it to share different things that I have learned in my classes or while working on sermons, and I am hoping that it will lead to some neat bits of wisdom for myself and those that might stumble across the page.

Well, that's all that I can think of to write. So... that's all for now!

You stay classy, World Wide Web!