I spent this past weekend at a retreat called “Shift” at Refreshing Mountain. And, I know it’s corny, but it was refreshing and well… I did experience a shift.
When you spend two days in the woods overlooking a beautiful valley, the air fresh and cool, surrounded by good friends, good food, good words of love and truth, well, it’s kind of hard not to have your heart opened up. To feel relaxed, your stress dead, peace pulsing in your veins, sort of just becomes common place. You feel full, alive, like everything makes sense and all is ah-oh-kay.
But…then you have to leave. You have to carry your sleeping bag back to campus, back to piles of homework you left locked out of your brain, back to being surrounded constantly by stressors and emotions and things to do and people to see and places to be. And to top it off, you get a cold, a bad one, one that leads to an ear infection and the need to sleep more hours of the day than you have between everything else on your calendar. And somehow, this is me right now, experiencing a complete 180 after having had so much peace and joy I didn’t know what to do with it.
And, if I allow it—the sickness, the workload, the task list, the lack of energy, the future, my emotions, the uncertainty, all of it and everything in-between—it will get to me. I will be defeated. This life is a battle, every single day. But the thing is, my circumstances don’t own me. I don’t have to be secluded from the whirlwind of college life at a place called Refreshing Mountain in order to be refreshed! The truth is, I can carry peace with me wherever I am, with whatever I am dealing with. I just need to choose to.
Recently, a dear friend of mine reminded me of this fact. We were at lunch, I was tired and groggy and sickly, and she looked at me and told me how much better this semester had been for her. She told me that she has begun to see good in each day, even if it is a bad day overall. Because there always is. There’s the burning hues of reds and oranges cutting through the beams of sunlight scattered between the clouds. There’s the friendly face passing by that lights up seeing you, acknowledging you. There’s the text from a friend back home, random and simple, saying I miss you. Small, simple, little things. Scattered throughout each day, each passing moment, always there if you let yourself see it. It’s like these small pieces of love sprinkled throughout our journey. And I believe, when we let ourselves find it, more and more it will no longer seem like a fruitless treasure hunt, but will rather be as easy as counting to ten.
Imagine what that would be like. Seeing love surrounding us in each moment, regardless of if today is a good day or a bad day. A busy day or a boring day. A rainy day or a sunny day, at Refreshing Mountain or not. What a shift that would be. What a beautiful world that would be. Finally, exhale, say It is well with my soul.
