April 29, 2012

Engaged Encounter weekend

I am playing catch-up on my posts right now, I've been a busy little bee this month and next month is shaping up to be pretty crazy as well.

Last weekend Kevin and I attended the Engaged Encounter marriage preparation retreat at the Visitation Monastery in Mobile. It was an action packed weekend - if your idea of action is sitting in metal chairs with thin pieces of foam for padding and listening to talk after talk about marital issues, of course.
One thing we both loved about the weekend was that there were no awkward ice breakers or weird group activities aimed at making us meet new people. The entire idea of the weekend was for us to focus on each other and God. Needless to say, with 30 other couples sharing a small area, we did meet some people, but nothing crazy. My roommate was another girl named Sheila - I guess our team leaders thought that was funny.
Anyway, I wouldn't say we really learned anything new about each other, but we talked about some sticky issues (hurrr hurrr - this is an NFP joke) and topics that we might usually stray from in usual conversation. The grounds of the monastery were absolutely beautiful, so serene. Our priest for the weekend was a 27-year old newbie who was working this weekend for his first time. He was great. If our journeys find us in Mobile, we'd definitely drive out of the way to go to his church.
 The structure for most of the weekend was about like I expected. They'd have a talk on a topic. Then pass out a sheet of questions. Then the boys and girls would split up to write our answers in our ever-important notebooks. After a designated period of time, we'd reunite and privately discuss our answers. It was nice and predictable but it meant my butt hurt from all the sitting and I felt like a 90-year old woman having to keep my leg propped up.



 I'm just going to post some of the pictures I took throughout the weekend. We had a lot of fun, but it was very tiring.
The nuns make their own Heavenly Hash. YUM!
<3
The retreat hall and girls dorms. The boys slept on the older, right side of the building

Our notebooks. <3
Our candle at the sweet little Love Feast they threw for us.
We graduated!

3 comments :

  1. I feel like I just relived my memory from the weekend we went. Glad you enjoyed it!

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  2. I LOVED our weekend!! We were there with a lot of other fun couples and even stayed up late with 2 other couples and walked the grounds and the house, scared ourselves to death too! LOL

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  3. Oh, see we wanted to go outside at night, but they told us the doors locked so we were scared we'd get locked out! haha We actually filled out a sheet at the end and put that we'd like to be involved in helping put on the weekends once we're married. If we're living here, we might could see about having them over here at Dedeaux or something!

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