Treat and Retreat were sitting on a bench, Treat fell off...

Back to it. The retreat. Oh yes. The sweet backwoods of Missouri. Rolling hills, make for rolling roads that are rather difficult to drive when your left headlight is out, your defrost knob is broken, it's foggy, raining that half way rain that only mists your windshield and doesn't quite cover it, and when the roads are just litered with cats. Cats everywhere. Piles and piles of them. They fall from the sky, and surge up from the ground and seem to emerge from the trees, I was lucky that I only hit one of them... Yes lucky indeed.

You can check out the pics here . Note the gargantuan slip n slide.
I think, Cap'n Ziegler, that this is this years Christmas Card...



Lance taught and I was so excited, because he was talking about Redemptive History and what it means to share the history of the bible. How Israel's slavery is our slavery, how the covenants morphed as God taught and expected more from his people in the context of where they were in his plan. "Noah, I like you, Noah, I'm going to save your family while I make a mess of this Earth, and then I'm never gonna do that again ... and Abraham, I'm gonna make you a father of many nations, I'm going to give you some land, it's going to have a proclivity for milk and honey, Moses, David, I'm givin' you some cool stuff too, the law and the lineage of Christ. Then, so you remember the covenants I made with you, I'll give you big giant parties to commemorate them with, and I will soak them in hints of the One to come and when he comes he will make a new covenant and he will change the parties that you will have and how you remember my covenants, and it will blow your mind" Anyway. I'm so into that Old Testament jazz, more about that probably later.

This retreat was like none other I'd been on, in that it was almost over-stimulating. I had a ton to think about and had much to praise God for and a slew of new people to get to know.

Shelly Carson at 2 in the morning thinks Anne Frank is Bogus, and I almost wet my pants. Canadians to B-Towns are Woebegone. I don't even know what that means. My first day of school was sultry, and Neil thinks Clint Eastwood is explosive. I tend to agree.

Slap happy laughing is my favorite kind, that almost drunken pure, everything is funny kind. Like the kind that ensued when I climbed into bed the first nite. In a room of about 20 girls, the final snickers had just died down, it was finally dead quiet. I climb into my top bunk and the bed lets out this "ER EE ERR EEE ER EE" squeaking noise. I was on all fours, trying not to move and realized that even if I got to a restful still position, I couldn't stay there all nite, cause I'm quite the east to west sleeper, so I climbed back out and relocated to a more stable location.

I fashioned a total of fourteen french braids on the weekend, four of them on Ziegler alone. Annie! hooked me up with some of my own. I think we would make fine Queen Latifah-type characters in my own version of Beauty Shop: "Little Shop of Murl". Yeah, I'd have scrabble tiles on the coffee tables and Ray Stevens playin' on the muzak. It would be a hootnanny.

We stood around the fire drinking cups of unidentified green, anti-freeze-esque liquid, ate the cliche s'mores, and sang every song that all of America knew at one point or another, loud enough for all of America to hear. Including a stirring rendition of Ebony and Ivory by DeeDee and Fox. Killin me. Neil is one of those closet karaoke machines. Richard Marx look out.

I always forget how many stars there are. Growing up I could always see them. I'd be shooting baskets in my driveway late at nite, as was often my custom to unwind, and they just are up there and there are so many that they cease to be points, they become a continous mass of light. Funny how you can't see them that well in the city.

3 on 3 tourney may have been the low point as I took a charge from Ishi, the National Champion Volleyball Player from WU and she flattened me. It was awesome. Sliced the crap out of my lower back on the concrete, and D^2 had to tend to my wounds and capture them on film. Don't have that pic, or you know I'd totally post it, butt crack and all.

The Foxes were in rare form.

Threw some fris, played some Jack, ate food, by the end of the weekend, my head felt like it was going to fall off from the joy, like drinking a slurpee too fast. Yeah that's what it felt like.

Great weekend. Great people. I am so blessed.