a surrender - 58

(Continuing "a surrender", chapter seven, "freely have you received, freely give") 

Over the weeks that followed, we slowly made our way south to my parents’ house. But we didn’t stay with them long. As soon as we arrived, we found out that one of the families at the farm had moved away, so there was an apartment available for us. And it was in a large community building that had a small library and several unused rooms next to the apartment, which could be made into guest bedrooms. So we took a bus back to the farm.

That winter, we started preparing our retreat house. We stripped wallpaper and painted all the rooms. We asked for donations of beds and blankets. We searched resale shops for sheets and towels and decorations, and found a pretty set of china dishes that could serve twelve. We wanted to treat the people who came for retreats as honored guests in our home, serving our best food, on our finest dishes. We wanted to show our respect for them, as Jesus did.

We were inspired by Jesus’ words, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” So our retreats would be free. And we would invite people who normally couldn’t afford retreats, from ministries and transitional programs, often from the city, and we’d offer transportation too. We already had some money from our wedding, and family and friends on the farm offered money for the retreats as well.

In the spring we started working on the farm again. I remember riding out to the fields on our bikes, in the chilly air of dawn, to pick sweet corn before market. We had to wear raincoats because the leaves were so wet with dew. Every day at lunchtime we ate quickly and fell into bed, so we could get some sleep before we had to start work again in the afternoon. Those days were long and exhausting.

Later that summer we had our first retreat guests come for a weekend. Friends had given us a dining room table and chairs just the day before. And only a few days before that we had finished painting the third guest room. We were still short two mattresses, two bedsprings, and a nightstand. Two families at the farm loaned us mattresses for the weekend, so we decided to just put the mattresses on the floor, and set up a temporary nightstand. The two staff people with the group slept in that room. There were fresh blueberries, green beans, potatoes, and lettuce from our garden, and several kinds of fresh bread from the farm bakery. I made pizza. Heather roasted two chickens. And everyone had as much as they wanted.

We listened a lot that weekend. And we all discussed the story of Jesus confronting a man’s demons. Heather read to us her own version of the story, to help us get a deeper understanding of what happened that day:

Bad storm today. The sky is as black as my mind, and the wind is whipping the lake till it heaves and groans with the pain, humps itself up into waves that are taller than me. Lightning rips down the sky onto the water, close—very close—the thunder cracks as soon as the light is gone, a sound of huge stone smashing against stone, almost drowning out the voices in my head.

Continued...