An uplifting day

Today I went to a Confirmation retreat. If we are being honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Actually I was upset that I was going to be missing a day of school. Today, however, turned out to be one of the more uplifting, fun days I have had in a while.

The first surprise was that it was only people from our church. I was expecting around 100 kids, like at youth rallies had have been to in the past. We were in a smaller room with maybe 30-35 kids. There was a man playing beautiful music, a mixture of Reggae and Rock. His named turned out to be Barry Kingston; he has released several albums and has been on MTV. The other leader was names Pat, and there were two there men helping out, Keith and Shane.

I don’t want to bore you with details, but here are some things that really stuck out to me:

• Pat told us a Mother Theresa quote, “I am only a pencil of God, with me he is writing his love letter”-I really loved this quote.
• Our parents secretly wrote us letters and we go to open them, I was very surprised and I’m not going to lie, I teared up.
• When we divided into smaller groups to talk about things I really felt like I could say anything, my group’s leader, Keith was awesome in welcoming our opinions.
• We got to play a couple of really fun games with the whole group, I was laughing so hard I was crying.

One topic we also talked about was, if you were going to die tomorrow what would you change. I’ve heard this a million times, but it really did make me think. I realized that a lot of the things I wanted to do were almost selfish, and not important. I realized I had to look deeper, what do I really need to do? What is my calling?

You can check out their website here: http://www.newspiritinc.org/nsi/page.html

In other news: I have a show tomorrow we are performing a waltz and exert from Paquita (Ballet). Also, my friend has another show for our high-school’s musical “The Drowsy Chaperone” (She’s Janet, the main role). I am anxiously awaiting an e-mail from Jacob’s Pillow regarding a summer job.