Have you ever had a dream that involved some kind of ministry for the Lord? After 40 years of pastoral ministry, I have had lots of ideas—some fruitful and some, not so much.
Kathy and I taught two weekends of marriage retreats during the first and third weekends of April. These weekends are a vital ministry of our church, Jefferson Baptist Church. They are held at the beautiful Odell Lake Resort. The lake itself is beautiful and if you add 6 feet of snow, it is off the charts!
Pastor Mike asked us if we would be willing to do the teaching at the two retreat weekends this year. We are committed to supporting the pastors at our church in any way we can, so the answer was “yes”. We thoroughly enjoyed both weekends. There were 18 couples the first weekend and 26 couples the second weekend. There was a good mixture of age groups, but predominately younger couples. Those couples brought so much life to Kathy and me. It is invigorating to be around them and to experience their joy for life and remember what it was like when we were young like that.
As Kathy and I were driving up to Odell Lake for the first weekend, we recalled a dream we had as a younger married couple. The dream was to have a camp or retreat center where married couples could get away and be encouraged in their marriages and be catered to at the retreat center. It was a dream we talked about often. Kathy’s parents had 40 acres of timberland up the North Umpqua River. It was beautiful and would have made the perfect retreat/conference grounds. However, that (another story) was not to happen.
As we were praying through the list of couples that would be attending the first weekend retreat, it suddenly dawned on us that we were actually getting to do what had only been a dream 40 years earlier! We did not have the retreat center, but we were going to be encouraging married couples in a beautiful setting and the Resort staff was going to cater to them and spoil them in any way possible. Snowmobile rides, Clydesdale drawn sleigh rides, snowshoeing, cross country skiing and great food. The Resort provides comfortable lodge rooms or individual cabins all of which portray the Hallmarky Rustic feeling.
God has been good to allow some fruition of our early dreams. It has encouraged us to stop and take inventory of many of the things we talked about and hoped for early in our Christian lives. As we do, we are finding that God has been faithful and has often times done things that we have only mentioned in passing as something we would desire to do for the Lord. Be careful what you dream for!
Standing in the Gap 