Weekend Away 2009 Review
Weekend Away Review 2009
What was the best part about the weekend away?
My first thought was that it was hanging around and chatting to people and being slightly silly (Fig 1). I think it’s great there was so much time for this in the programme, it shows one of our top priorities is each other. (There are rumours that John Hindley sang some Bon Jovi, but I won’t believe it unless I see some evidence.)
Figure 1 – Lochie con pottie
The setting was also amazing (Fig 2), the cakes were good, and in our teambuilding exercise we totally trashed the opposition, so that was a success.
However, were I to write up the weekend away, six weeks late, saying that the cakes were the best bit, some might say I had missed the point. Of course it’s fun to hang around and chat to people- they’re like little images of God, however reflected in a dim distorted mirror. The beauty of the setting too lets us see a tiny little corner of who God is.
Figure 2 – Lake View
The piece of Bible we focused on was also mostly focused on God’s glory, and his control, especially written for people who couldn’t see it at the time because they were being persecuted.
I won’t attempt to distil the sense of God’s glory that comes from Revelation in this write-up. Like watching people while you chat to them, and like looking at the sky, it’s poetry, and I’m not good at that. Jesus is “like a Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.”
I’m not going to beat this. I can only suggest you read the original (Revelation 1, 4-7) or listen to the talks, which can be downloaded here. One of the other messages from the weekend away is that Revelation isn’t as hard as it looks – if you look at the main themes, the broad sweep of the book first, before you try to work out what the eyes under the wings mean, it’ll be fine. And we discovered that most of the bits that you don’t know immediately what they mean are references to the Old Testament – for example the “Son of Man” quoted above turned up earlier in Daniel.