Terugvoering oor die Retreat

The one thing we most sorely lack in our lives, and we most sorely need in our lives, are those quiet personal times with God where He speaks into our hearts about the questions, disappointments and prayers we feel are left unanswered. A time where the tired and worn out come to experience how He refreshes the weary soul and tells the lonely heart how much He loves them.

The last weekend of November, fifteen of us women went to Dubai to retreat into this quiet place with God. We booked in at the Premiere Inn, and for two hours my orders to the women was to just unwind and relax. Our first session was based on quieting our anxious hearts, and won’t you have it, of the two days this was the most difficult part. Psalm 139:23-24 says, “Search me O God, and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts, see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in Your way everlasting”. After an hour and half of praying and meditating on this verse Psalm 23; 42 and 63, we had good food and good fellowship.

Our evening session was based on Jesus standing up at the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, and saying in a loud voice, John 7:37-39 “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. ³⁸ Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” ³⁹ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified” ... We spent the session in worship of song and prayer and asked the Holy Spirit to fill us again. And then we retreated into a time of silence, each on her own with her Saviour.

The next morning, we had breakfast and laughed together, after which we drove to the Al Sahra Desert Resort. This is the same place we spent the retreat at last year, and we were surrounded by the beauty of old Arabic architecture, and sand dunes, with a little oasis of grass and date palms.

We started out once again, by quieting down our anxious hearts. After which we studied Psalm 139, and heard about it from the perspective of Linda Dillow, who wrote about it in her book “Calm my Anxious Heart”. In our culture we are so concerned about how we look, and most of the time, especially women, we are dissatisfied with how God made us. Each of us had the opportunity to hear once again, that God loves us and that we are beautiful to Him, just the way He created us. A quote by C.S Lewis summed it up best;

“I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, and most precious thing in all thinking”

We could reflect on the past 24 hours by exercising our creative parts. We ended of the retreat by making wooden crafts, sign boards with the scripture, word, or sentence that would keep us coming back to this place of retreat under our Saviour’s wings, every time we looked at it or saw it.