Arriving at the Bishop’s Retreat

After church services on Sunday, we ate lunch and hurriedly packed for our trip to the Willow Valley Resort, the location of the Bishop’s Retreat (an annual gathering for clergy families from our conference).

This is our first time attending the Bishop’s Retreat. Tex Sample is the guest speaker this year; he was also the guest speaker at the 2007 Central Pennsylvania Annual Conference. We’ve been looking forward to this event. Tex is a great storyteller and communicator!

It had snowed Saturday night and was still snowing Sunday when we left Clearfield around 2:00 pm. Once we got out of the area, though, we outpaced the snow and made good time. It actually snowed in this part of the state today (apparently, it was a surprise), which caused many serious traffic problems for today’s travelers!

After we arrived in Lancaster, PA and checked in to the Willow Valley Resort, we ate dinner, then returned to the room to pick up the AFC Championship game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens. The Steelers won and are headed to the Super Bowl.

With the game on past Ethan’s bedtime (even with the volume extremely low), and because we were in a strange place, Ethan didn’t go to sleep very well on the first night here. He did much better tonight, though! He also did very well in tonight’s first session in child care where he spent about two hours, part of which went past his bedtime.

Since the Bishop’s Retreat began late in the afternoon, we took part of the day to do some shopping here in Lancaster. I wanted to go to the Apple Store at the Park City Center — I had never been to an Apple Store; it was pretty awesome!

After lunch at the mall, Ethan played in the huge kids’ play area. On the drive to the Lenox Store where Joleen wanted to go, Ethan fell asleep, so he and I both took naps while Mommy went into the Lenox Store (thanks, Ethan! 😉 ).

We had our first session of the Bishops’ Retreat tonight. Tomorrow, there’s a morning session followed an early lunch, and then some of us will watch the Inauguration as a group (it’s optional). We’ll get the afternoon off, then we’ll be back for an evening session. The Bishop’s Retreat will finish up with a final session Wednesday morning.

I’ll try to post some thoughts on the things that are impacting me here, particularly through Tex Sample’s talks.

2 thoughts on “Arriving at the Bishop’s Retreat”

  1. We will be crossing paths. Our Retreat at Willow Valley for the Greater New Jersey Conference starts Wednesday at Lunch!

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  2. Ah, that’s interesting. We’re even more “connectional” than I thought. 🙂

    I knew that we scheduled our annual conference session each June back-to-back with the Eastern PA Conference at Messiah College. But I didn’t know we did that in other ways as well.

    BTW, we have about 30 clergy and spouses here from the PA districts of the Wyoming Conference, which will be uniting with the Central PA Conference to form a new one (in 2010, I believe).

    Anyway, enjoy your stay at Willow Valley!

    Reply

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