The Spiritual Side of Quilt Camp

I wasn't sure what to expect from quilt camp in terms of the spiritual aspect.  I knew that we'd have devotions each morning, devotions led by our leader who has graduate level training.  Would she tie it into quilting?  Would there be a larger theological theme?

Our leader, Mitzi Spencer Schafer decided to focus on prayer for our theme.  On Thursday morning, we thought about the Lord's Prayer.  Mitzi talked about how many of us see ourselves as the actors in our prayers, but we don't always think about God and the actions that God takes.  We took some time to meditate on what the Lord's Prayer teaches us about the priorities of God.  For more, read Mitzi's blog post here.

On Friday morning, we talked about prayer breathing, and then we went through the process together.  If you'd like to try it, Mitzi's blog post is the next best thing to being here with us.

On Saturday morning, we had a brief session where Mitzi introduced the concept of Mad Libs.  In my child, we used them to create a HILARIOUS piece of writing.  You'd fill in blanks with an adjective or a color or a way of doing a verb or something you'd find at the beach.  Then you'd get the information around the blanks, and if you were lucky, unintended humor ensued.

Mitzi had created a Mad Lib around Psalm 150--if you want to try for yourself, her blog post has a downloadable form.  Mitzi asked us to spend the day thinking about how we'd fill in the blanks and said we'd read them in the evening, if we felt OK with sharing.  Here's what I created:

We had great responses.  I loved how we filled in the blanks with activities we were doing during the retreat, along with larger aspects.  One person wrote "with tired eyes and just one more row."  Laughter showed up on more than one list.  

I loved this process for the reasons that I love poetry--at its best, it was a great way to get us thinking about what we'd been doing and what God has been doing in a new way.

In fact, that was one of the recurring themes of the devotion time, and I can't think of many better ways to spend our reflective time together.