Retreat

This past Friday and Saturday with 12 other men from our church, I was able to attend the annual fall men retreat at the Servant’s Heart Camp in Ramey, Pennsylvania. There were 61 men total who joined together at the event. SCHM offers weekend retreats for men, women, older single people, couples, pastors, and several weeks of children camps throughout the year. The campers’ cabins cluster around a large lake nestled in the wooded hills of Pennsylvania.

Each of the camp’s programmed events center around the idea of having great Christian speakers offering food for the soul and the culinary geniuses preparing nutritious and delicious meals. Those two items alone are worth the effort to attend, but then there are the activities.

All throughout the campers’ stay there are scheduled events and ones that are open to attend throughout the time there. A huge white tent holds a variety of games that are open for the free, in-between times of scheduled programs. The free time events include fishing, canoeing, hiking on the miles of wooded trails, and weather permitting, swimming.

Things that are supervised and scheduled are skeet shooting, pistol and 0.22 caliber range shooting, archery, spear throwing from a “chariot,” blow guns, target shooting with a muzzle loader, laser target practice, and shooting the air cannon called “Blamzooka.”

Other activities include the exciting nine-square” game, horse shoes, bocce ball, “Hillbilly horse shoe,” “Octoball," the obstacle course, and the bungee run. I have listed most of them, but there are so many, I am sure I have forgotten some.

I’ve already mentioned the great tasting meals, but now I would like to share that the sermons were wonderful. The entire weekend event was called a retreat, but the challenge of the messages was not for men to retreat, but for men to step forward and to charge into God’s expected role for them in our families, churches, and in our country. Thank you to the wonderful staff at the Servant’s Heart Camp. You all are such blessings.