Back to reality

I returned early this afternoon to Effingham from a weekend (and a Monday) away in the Gem City to serve as the Spiritual Director for Great River Teens Encounter Christ #254.

Eighteen candidates participated in the retreat and were each - thanks be to God! - led closer to Jesus Christ. It was an excellent weekend, and my first TEC as a priest. It was a humble delight.

I left Effingham Friday afternoon shortly before practice began for the soccer team. After spending a couple of hours with the boys each day of the week - except for Sunday - it felt rather strange not to see them for a day. I drove the nearly four hour drive home thinking of the boys and hoping they would play in a tournament the next day.

Arriving in Quincy I went to the retreat center to unload my things. Checking in with the director I made my way to my room, room 328.

The retreat center was built as a Franciscan seminary and became a college dorm. When I lived in the dorm, one side of the building was a dorm and the other side was the retreat center. This weekend we were in the side of the building that was the dorm.

It felt so good to be back in the building in which I lived for three years, but it felt odd, too. Things were so familiar and yet so different. Many happy memories were relived as I wandered through the halls.

At the same time, though, it was proven once again that I am all too often an idiot. But that's alright.

As I climbed the stairs to the third floor I forgot my room number. I returned to the conference room and some of the "adult" team kindly wrote my room number on my nametag. So, back to the stairs I went.

When I stepped into the third floor hallway I went in search of my room, but I could not find it. I found room 329 and room 330, but I could not find room 328. I consulted a map on the bulletin board and confirmed where my room should be, but still could not find it.

The adults found this very amusing, especially since I lived in the building for so long. As it turns out, I was given a suite with apparently two room numbers. The door off of the hallway was labeled 329 and the door inside 329 that went to the bedroom was 328. Who knew?

After the adventure of finding my room I returned to my car to collect a few more things, only to be the first person of the weekend to be locked out of the building. The adults enjoyed this quite a bit, too.

Throughout the weekend I found myself singing Christmas carols at random, walking the halls following random groups of people only to realize I wasn't going where I wanted, and all sorts of other strange things. It was a lot of fun! To top it all off, when I went to finish up my major talk of the weekend, I found I left my outline and notes somewhere in Effingham; I still haven't found them.

At other times of the weekend I was scouring through the "manual" looking for what my responsibilities were for the weekend. For every service and talk I was to give I found two or three possibilities, none of which were complete in and of themselves, and much of which was contradictory. Consquently, when I wasn't mindlessly roaming about, I was trying to piece together what had to be done.

Why do I mention all of this? Saint Paul speaks of the "foolishness of God" (I Corinthians 1:25) and of becoming foolish in order to become wise (cf. I Corinthians 3:18). Saint Francis, too, referred to himself as a fool for Christ. This weekend I feel I joined their ranks.

Anyone who watched me this weekend bumble my way along would have had little confidence in my ability to function properly, and yet somehow everything came together.

I am a naturally goofy person, even if few people get to see this side of me. There's something about retreats that bring out my goofiness and seem to highlight it. What strikes me most about it is:

The Lord is able to take this man who can't remember his notes for his talk, who can't find his room, who locks himself out of a building, who mindlessly follows a group not knowing where they are going, and who very can't remember what he got up to do and use him for his own purposes.

Somehow the Lord used me well this weekend to speak of him and to witness the power of his love. For this, I am humbled and deeply grateful to him.