Painful Separation

This past weekend I accompanied a group of friends to a cabin in Lycoming County. We have taken to calling it our annual Men's Retreat. Everyone met at our house Friday afternoon. I left work early, and on the way home stopped in to bid Amy farewell at her work. It was rather painful.

We stopped at Sheetz and McDonalds and Giant on the way and stocked up on foodstuffs. We sat around and ate and talked and sang (we forgot to take a music box along, so we made our own music, complete with lots of cackling) and played games and shot our guns and slept all Saturday afternoon. We argued with the propane; it did not want to burn steadily, but it would occasionally light off when enough came out of the nozzle. Ker-thump. The good news is that the oven did eventually light, and we were able to make egg casserole for brunch and lasagna for supper.

All the married guys complained all weekend how much we missed our wives, and the single guys listened with great wonder. By Sunday morning the loneliness was at an all-time high, and we set a new record of 10:30 AM for leaving the cabin Sunday. We made it home again by 2:00, so I was MIA for exactly 47 hours. A very joyful reunion took place at that time.

A friend from work tells me he avoids home, because his wife makes him clean. I want to tell him to clean the house for her, and perhaps she won't make him do it.

Quite a number of people have told me over the years that when a fella gets married, he loses contact with the friends he had in his single days. My old friends and I are determined to get together at least a couple times a year and relive our glory days. (We'll try not to call ourselves "The Gang.") This past weekend was one of those times. Methinks the glory days are right now, at home, with my best friend ever.

Comin' Round the Mountain

There is a men's group that meets every Tuesday morning at 5:30 AM at Womelsdorf. I've found myself attending sporadically. We watch videos on the projector that circulate the via email and sing rousing songs like "Shine Jesus Shine" and "We Bring the Sacrifice of Praise" and drink coffee and eat doughnuts. We have a man-book with lessons that we study, and everyone says they are very good. We learn how to be real men of God that truly put our wives and families first and not just exist as self-centered religious domineering males in the conservative tradition, but rather be leaders in our homes that our wives want to follow. After the lesson, we gather in small groups and talk about how the lesson challenged us and what changes we will make in our lives as a result. In my group there is a man who has one of the most soft-spoken personalities ever; he tells us about his anger problems. Another extrovert tells us how great his kids are turning out. There is a variety of denominations present; out of 70 or 80 registered attendees there are something like 50 different congregations represented. It is the most diverse group of men I have ever seen gathered in a Mennonite church building.

It is good.

Newbs

Tonight we had our young married couples group together again. We started up about a year ago, and have really strengthened some friendships with other young couples from church, and made a number of new friends as well. We started out with 8 couples, and now we're somewhere around 12 or 14 couples in three groups, plus mentor couples. Tonight we discussed applying Old Testament law to daily life today; specifically, how the laws regarding clean animals and the type of cloth our garments are crafted from are really obsolete, but how there are practical applications we can draw from them. Kind of a dry, dusty subject. We had a great discussion, and could have kept it going for quite some time.

The farmers talked about tractors, the mechanics talked about bulldozers and four-wheel drives, and the contractor types talked about roofing in the winter; the ladies had a rather in-depth discussion about pregnancy that I found rather entertaining... as I eavesdropped from the other side of the room. Its amazing that the human race has managed to survive, given all the precautions that seemingly must be made these days.

We also discovered that my listener has still to become functional. I made what I thought was a rather clever suggestion for our next meeting; evidently Josh had already made the same suggestion and everyone had already concurred. Except me. Not sure where I was at the time. Maybe thinking about four-wheel drives.