Salt Company Retreat

DISCLAIMER: This post is going to be very real. It is going to be serious, and it may shock you. If you are looking for my usual humor, skip to the next post. If you want to glimpse a little further into me than I generally feel comfortable letting people see, keep reading.

This past weekend was the Salt Company Fall Retreat, and a lot of things happened, but I'm going to focus on one small (in the length of time, not importance) set of events.

It all happened after Ed Noble finished his third (and final, if you don't count the Q & A) message of the weekend, which was about letting God into your "dark places". During the worship I felt like I was being pushed toward kneeling right where I was. I knelt down, and just felt one of the "dark places" open up. I had kept it shut, fearing that my friends would be weird around me for a while if I told. --THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SKIP TO THE NEXT POST AND AVOID READING WHAT I'M ABOUT TO REVEAL--


In my pre-Christian life, I was so deep in lust that I even fantasized about other men. These thoughts still surface from time to time, so they're not gone, I won't lie and say they are, but I try to push them away now. They started sometime in high school, I'm not sure exactly when. This is partially why I was so upset when Fred Phelps came to my high school graduation to protest because our class president was gay--I identified easily with the class president, even though I had never met him.

I began to feel that God wouldn't let me simply bury it again, and I needed to tell. The tears began to flow down my face from fear more than anything else. After a little while, Ed invited anyone that felt they needed to be prayed for to come down by the stage, and I picked out a nice little spot right in the center. Various Salt leaders came down and prayed over the people on their knees by the stage, and I felt a little more sure that I could reveal that secret--I opened up and shared it in my small group afterward, and of course now it's right here for all to read.

Then Ed started to talk about specific prayers for people to pray with him. The third one hit me hard. He said he felt that there were some of us in the crowd who were being called to do something but it seems too scary--see this post and this post if you don't know what hit me about that. Next he mentioned that we all knew someone--or multiple someones--that needed to know Christ. Thoughts of my parents hit me hard right there.

I cried through most of that worship, and was the last of the people up front to actually stand. Even without my glasses--if you ever see me remove my glasses during worship or a sermon, it's because I'm crying and I don't like to get tears on them--I could see the concern on some of the faces of the Anthem band when they saw me still on the floor, weeping. After a while of sitting on the floor, weeping, singing, and praying to God all at once--actually somewhat easy to do for me, since the songs were right in line with what I needed to pray--I put on my glasses and shifted position so I was holding my knees in an upright, semi-fetal position. Anyone that saw that and was worried for me then, I was okay at that point, and ready to stand up, with just one problem--both of my legs were asleep, so I had to wait them out. When I stood, I saw a smile cross the face of one of Anthem's singers--don't know her name, sorry--and smiled myself before throwing myself headlong--figuratively--into worship.

After worship came small group session, and there was a barn dance going on after that, but I was so exhausted after what felt like being hit by a freight train that I just skipped the dance and went back to my bunk to crash. I was so out of it, I didn't even wake up when the guys that went came back in to the cabin--for those that were in the Treetoppers, you know how hard that is, there's the blast of cold air as the door opens and lets what little heat is in the cabin out, then the creaking as people climb to the top bunks. I was even on a bottom bunk, right below someone that went to the dance--the bottom bunk shakes badly when the person on the top moves even slightly--and I still slept straight through.