FAITH-FILLED LONGING IN A BROKEN WORLD
2022 Women’s Retreat Michelle Kelley
I want, more than anything, to_________________. I’m earnestly praying for_________________. How would you complete these sentences? Our world today is filled with “wanting.” Turn on the radio and you’ll hear songs about people wanting a relationship, turn on the TV and you’ll be flooded with ads trying to convince you to want to buy their products. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook–all these play to our enjoyment and our consumption. Actress and television writer, Amy Poehler has said, “It doesn’t matter how much you get; you are left wanting more.” We are people who want. As Christians, it can be hard to know how to handle our desires. We see from the very beginning pages of Scripture that our desires can lead us down the road of temptation. Eve listens to the whispering voice of the serpent and chooses to sinfully take what she wants, instead of trusting what God has bountifully given.
We trust in asking; we trust in receiving. Holy trust believes that whatever God chooses to give is enough.” It can be scary to ask God for what we want. He might say no. But, when we dwell upon the words of the Bible which speak of God’s faithfulness in the past and his great love for us, we can come to him in prayer and ask for what is on our hearts. “Cast all your anxieties upon him,” Peter writes, “because he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:7) God loves to give good gifts to his children. It can be challenging to be expectant and hopeful of God in the middle of unanswered prayers. God is not a vending machine who promises to give us everything we ask, but he does invite us to ask him for what we need, and to bring our desires before him. It is this tension, and God’s faithfulness and goodness in all of it, that we will be dwelling upon for the weekend. I hope you will join us for our Women’s Retreat on February 25-27 at the Abbey Resort in Fontana, Wisconsin. I expect it will be a rich, life-giving and formative weekend as we learn together with Jen Pollock Michel about what it looks like to have faith-filled longings in a broken world. I’ll see you there!
And yet, many of the things we want are good things–the salvation of a family member or friend, relief from pain, physical or emotional healing, a spouse, a child, a quiet weekend away or a job that uses our gifts. Jesus, too, invites his followers to pray and ask God for what we want, saying in Matthew 7:11, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” And so, we come to a tension–how do we hold these things together? This is the theme for the 2022 Women’s Retreat: Faith-Filled Longing in a Broken World. We are delighted to welcome author, mother-of-five and coffee-drinker Jen Pollock Michel to join us for the weekend. Jen acknowledges this tension between longing and faith in her book Teach Us to Want. Teach Us to Want addresses the theology of desire, using the Lord’s Prayer as a foundation. Jen writes as someone who has known heart-wrenching desire and has come out of trials with faith. She pertinently connects desire and honest prayer with trusting in God. She writes, “Trust is at the center of holy desire: trust that God is good and wills good for his people.
Registration opens December 6 with early bird pricing, which ends January 2. We work hard to keep the price for the retreat as low as possible, but never want pricing to prevent you from joining us. Contact Mary DeMoss at mdemoss@ college-church.org to learn more about pricing discounts and scholarships.
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