General - Emmaus and Things afterward

I haven't been able to get to the computer to put any thoughts as of late due to lots of schedule problems. Not because I get diverted by a certain woman that I happen to be seeing, although the diversion are really quite nice, but because I just finished up an Emmaus cycle. For those of you who don't know what a Walk to Emmaus retreat is all about go here. My description of it will be rather mundane, but the actual retreat is one that truly draws one closer to God. I have seen some lives changed, and with my own Walk, it helped me move onto a new level of understanding. During the closing ceremonies of the women's weekend this last Sunday, one of the pilgrims described it as a masters of God program crammed into a three day event. I would have to agree.

There was a time, when people thought that they needed to keep the weekend a secret, so that we wouldn't spoil the surprises and they wouldn't have any expectations about the weekend. However, in the past couple of years, especially, there has been a move afoot to open it up so that people didn't think it was some kind of cult. There are no secrets about an Emmaus weekend. For the most part it is a series of 15 talks, that range from priorities to grace and the different facets of it. There is a lot of discussion and a few special things that the Emmaus community does to show Christ's love to the pilgrims taking their walk.

The Walk to Emmaus is actually administered by the Upper Room. It got started by people in the United Methodist Church who had taken a Catholic Cursillo retreat (really the same thing just a different church doing it). The UMC gave it to the Upper Room to maintain and have it become ecumenical. So now, as one who sits on the board of directors of the local community I represent one of many churches in northeast Lower Michigan and portions of east Upper Michigan. I encourage everyone to take a walk, when they feel lead by God to do so. Mine was quite a time.

After the weekends were done, I went on day shifts and just trying to relax a bit before my next round of evening shifts (3pm to midnight) which start tomorrow.

Today was a good day for as I like to call it, decompression. I took care of a few things, and tried my hand at recording an audio tape onto my hard drive in mp3 format. That worked well. So now I can put our church's Sunday service on the new church website which I hope to start tomorrow or Saturday.

At work, we are entering the pre-spring season, which is the run up to all of the specialized forecasts that we do from spring to fall, like fire weather (I am the program leader on this) and the marine forecasts for our nearshore waters. So I have been busy getting our Annual Operating Plan (AOP) ready for the spring meeting coming up at the end of the month and getting the meeting planned as well. This will be a busy couple of weeks, but not too bad. Oh yeah have to remember to schedule my SAWRS visits too...