Hearing from God

I must apologize for how sporadic I've been at continuing my retreat story. There's been a good bit going on with me lately (not busyness persay, but just stuff), much of it along the lines of the kinds of things I'll be sharing about the retreat, and all very good. If I can ever get all caught up, it will make for a pretty awesome collection. But anyhow, back to the story...

So, our team made it to Ocean City, NJ for the retreat, absent on the trip down (and altogether, really) the messy weather that the doom and gloom (and constantly wrong this year) weather forecasters had said would meet us. As is typical when we do a retreat at this location, we got in around 8:30-9. We had our first (and only major) glitch of the weekend when we found out that the realtor had forgotten to leave us the key to the 2nd condo we had rented. Fortunately we had enough room at the primary place, the 2nd condo was just to make sleeping arrangements a bit better for our married couples.

We basically just unpacked and then chilled for a while before turning in on Friday night. We awoke Saturday morning, and without having to worry about the "chore" of making/getting and eating breakfast, we got right to it. We had a time of worship and then just really spent some serious time praying that God would guide our time, protect us from any interference, help us to focus in on him, etc.

After that, my mentor Joe had suggested that the first order of business when preparing to go into a time of listening to God was to have a discussion about hearing from God, how that happens, various forms, etc. As I had been praying about our time, my sense was that the way that discussion should start was to simply ask everyone to share when the last time they felt they had clearly heard from God was, and how it had happened. Since I had an obvious answer to the question (my experience from the Tuesday before the retreat), I led off.

This time was my first tangible confirmation that God really had something special in store for us that day. A couple of others shared their stories, and then one of our number started to share, and he said that he felt like God had spoke to him even as we were sharing. He shared how as the first few of us had been sharing, he had been struggling with a bad attitude/some unbelief - kind of a "This isn't real, they aren't really hearing from God" sort of mentality (been there, done that myself, many times btw), but then he really felt God's conviction asking him why, if none of this was real, was it being fought against so strongly? Good question, huh? And then another one of the guys said he felt like God had spoke to him even as the first was sharing. Totally awesome! Even in this time of discussion, when we weren't even "trying" to hear from God, he was speaking, and was using the time to clear away some doubt and other obstacles to what He was going to share with us as the day went on.

I had been very excited for the weekend before, but I was totally stoked at this point. God was showing up and proving so faithful!