4 men on retreat was a great time. I came away knowing I am very privileged and cared for by this great group of friends.

It was good to catch up with my (old) friends and have time together to reflect and time alone to pray. The convent in Nympsfield is one of those places where it is pretty impossible to be distracted. There is no wifi signal. There is no mobile phone signal. Well .. that’s not strictly true I did manage to get a signal by walking to the top of the hill, climbing up a tree and stretching my phone up in the air as far as I can. That gave me one bar of reception now and again.

Due to its relative remoteness I find silence is very easy to achieve here … and so I spent a lot of time in silence before God. I used the Jesus Prayer a lot; so as well as reading I spent a lot of time in silence before my Creator God. In that silence God seemed to transform some fears into hopes and some longings into dreams. Most of all I seemed to receive two things:
God seemed to remind me of promises and I had this great sense of God simply saying ‘trust me’.
God also reminded me that he called me as me and so a little bit of remembering who I am started to happen. It was nothing like a mirror but the best way of describing this feeling was like standing in front of God who was a mirror. maybe a better illustration would be the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It seemed as well as reminding me who I am, that God was reminding me what I longed for most. Maybe I will share that at another time when I am happy to make myself a little more vulnerable and ‘feel’ the grace of my readers!

Trust seems so simple to do in theory .. and yet I find it so difficult when the world and stuff I have ‘learned’ (and maybe need to unlearn) crashes back in on my life.
But i guess trust is hard, gritty and involve pain … I don’t know … but to trust connects with my vulnerability writings earlier in the year. The other side of the trust coin is vulnerability, as we inevitably have to open up ourselves to be let down.

Anyway … a great few days where I was blessed by friendship and challenged by God…. thank you.