High School Retreat

Wow, where to begin! The town was an adorable Alpine mountain village, and the slopes literally were across the street from our youth hostel. We had the entire hostel for our 200+ students and 50 staff members, which was super nice. The beds had fluffy down comforters, the food was a.m.a.z.i.n.g., and the decorations all bought at Ikea. I spent a wonderful day on Friday on the slopes: the morning teaching a student which end to point the skis and how to let gravity do the work rather than the poles. In the afternoon, I got to go fast with some of the other RA's - soooooo fun! The only scary part was going down a black diamond and coming across a patch that was all mogels - not my favorite!

The four session with our speaker, Greg Speck (he spoke at Northwestern at least once a year) were fabulous! He balanced Biblical truth with practical applications and teenage humor perfectly, and the students related to him so easily. Praise God for that! The time with my small group, which was made up of 5 senior girls, was overall excellent. On Friday, we were all dead from skiing all day, so conversation was somewhat stilted. But by Saturday, everyone was open, very open, in fact. I was pleasantly surprised by the transparency, and we had some beautiful times of prayer together. There were also great times of laughter. For one activity of the weekend, we were matched up with a guys small group and had to pick and perform a Disney song. Our group chose "Kiss the Girl" (can you tell we had senior girls and freshmen guys?), and within 30 minutes, we had to be ready to go on stage. In all the franticness of practicing, guess who got cast in the role of Ariel? Yeah! Actually, the funniest part was that of the 16 teams total, 10 chose "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan. We were SO sick of that song by the end of the weekend!

On Saturday, we were hit with a blizzard that dumped nearly a foot of snow on us. I opted to not go skiing in the snow storm and instead rested. It was a good decision! Anyway, here are some of my few pictures. Thanks for all the prayers for this weekend!

(bag line to load bus)