cu small group weekend

Now Playing: The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis, dramatization by Focus on the Family Radio Theatre. Track 3, "The Signs".

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming (i.e., writing essays) to bring you this special report, an episode from this past weekend, during which the CU small group Bible study that I'm in, with Rachel and Emmaline, went to Sheep Island View Hostel in Ballintoy for a weekend retreat. The MPC (maths-physics-computer science) small group is normally split into two groups, one that meets on Wednesday night and one that meets on Thursday night, but this weekend was a joint event.

April 19, 2008. This morning I woke up in my top bunk. The room was quiet. I always hate getting up first, so I waited until Allie got up. Allie is one of the leaders of the Wednesday night group, a lovely tall girl with luxurious straight strawberry blond hair. She went into the shower. I crawled out of my bunk and found Claire awake (not Claire W., but a girl who usually goes to the Wednesday night group, who looks like Laura's friend Michelle, and who is chirpy, friendly, and always ready to talk about anything and everything). Claire happily told me about her night: she and a group of others had gone out for a joyride to the beach at 2 a.m. We were sitting and laughing quietly about it when the sleeping bag bundled on one of the bottom bunks groaned and moved, and turned out to be a very sleepy Emmaline.

We got dressed in stages and were down in the kitchen for breakfast by ten o'clock or so. There were two other groups sharing the hostel this weekend, plus an assortment of French and Dutch travelers. After breakfast, Steve dismissed us to do our quiet times for forty-five minutes. I went outside, down the hill, across the little road, and to a bench at the edge of the fields facing north. Before me, two fields sloped down and up again, and where they sloped up, they ended, and beyond them was royal blue sea, flashing with waves. The morning was gorgeous: a bracing northeast wind, clear sunshine, aquamarine sky, gulls and rooks flying over the fields where tractors where plowing. Sheep and lambs grazed in a field nearby, and a small shaggy pony stood and watched from the field closest to me. I lasted about half-an-hour in the cold and brisk wind, and then retreated back into the hostel to finish my devotions in the deserted kitchen.

At half eleven, we grouped up in the common room of the hostel for our speaker, another Steven, a youth worker at Steve and Allie's church, to give us our second talk on the armor of God from Ephesians. We had a long discussion time, and then lunch.

After lunch, we eventually got ourselves sorted enough to get into cars and drive to Emmaline's family's farm to pick up things for the barbecue tonight. The afternoon was still lovely. When Emmaline was ready, we were split into four teams of three, and headed into Coleraine for our photo challenge--a scavenger hunt of sorts, though instead of taking pictures of objects, we were supposed to take pictures of ourselves doing a variety of crazy things. Claire, Emmaline, and I were together.

Our first stop was a little park in a green hollow in the town, near the main shopping area. Here we took a picture of us "hanging": Emmaline and Claire swinging upside-down from the monkey bars. Also, we took a picture of "upside-down": Claire holding me upside down by my feet while I did a handstand. "Hugging a tree" wasn't too difficult in a park. Then we walked on up the street into the central pedestrian shopping area. Here Emmaline and Claire ran into Topman so that I could take a picture of them posing "in a shop window". Emmaline stopped a man passing by to take a picture of the three of us "in a phone booth", and then Claire took a picture of Emmaline and me pretending to "sleep" on the edge of a planter. Emmaline and Claire both kept running into people they knew from school or church. Walking down toward the town hall, we noticed a group of soldiers picking up their equipment from a demonstration of some sort. Claire marched up to one of them and asked him for a picture; he, with good-humor, provided us with a picture of "someone in uniform". In down the street, Emmaline spotted a gift shop. "They're really nice in that shop," she said, so we popped in, and the two shopkeepers, both middle-aged women, were absolutely delighted to let us take a picture of us pretending to "work behind a counter". They then sent us down the street to a hairdresser's, where one of the girls in the salon pretended to cut Claire's hair for a picture of someone "getting a haircut".

Back out in the street, Claire and I took turns of each other "dancing". Emmaline and I practiced our two-hand reel in the middle of the street. We walked to the mall, where Emmaline found one of her school friends working in a shoe shop. She gleefully assisted us in our next challenge, a picture of us "buying something with shoes on our heads". Out in the mall again, Emmaline saw another of her school friends, a fluttery little girl, who took a "funny" picture of us sitting on a children's toy. In a bookstore a little further down, I took a picture of a "farmyard scene", composed of Emmaline and Claire holding up children's books about barn animals. Walking back to the car, we took a rather random picture of Claire and me, with our feet in plastic shopping bags, pretending to have a sack race, to satisfy the "winning a race" qualification.

On our way back to the car, we stopped in the park again. Emmaline asked a young man to take a picture of the three of us making a "pyramid", and then of the three of us "in midair", hanging from the swings on the swingset. We drove to another park where there was a fountain, and when we parked there, we asked a couple of boys who were hanging out near the car park to take a picture of us "in the boot of a car". There was a gazebo in the park, so Claire to our "scene from a movie" picture: Emmaline and me pretending to perform the sixteen-going-on-seventeen song from The Sound of Music. For our underwater picture, since we were running out of time, Emmaline went to the fountain in the park and stuck her head underneath it.

It was six o'clock, and the shops were beginning to close. On our way to the car, we found a shopping trolley outside Pound Stretchers, so I took our last photo, of Emmaline and Claire "in a shopping trolley".

Back at the hostel, we sat in the common room waiting for everyone else to come back. When everyone was back, we had our third talk. After the third talk, Rachel, Steve, Emmaline, and I went into the kitchen to collect the supplies for our barbecue. Allie and Matt went down to White Park Bay beach to start the fire. It took us awhile to get all the food together: Rachel and Steve had wisely decided to cook the meat first before we took it to the grill, but the ovens in the hostel were rather temperamental, so it took awhile.

Emmaline, Rachel, Steve, Nathan, and I drove down to the beach at last, at about half nine. The beach wasn't too far away--at least the car park wasn't, but the beach itself was a long walk down a steep hillside. We stood at the top of the hill staring out into the dark, trying to see the others, until finally we heard Phil shouting up at us faintly. We headed down the hill, slipping and tripping on odd flights of stairs cut into the hillside or on slippery patches. At last we found everyone else. The grill was set up in the lee of a ruined building, a house or church, its whitewashed bulk looming against the dark sky. In the east, above the crown of the hill, the full moon was rising through pale clouds. Faint stars were shining in the dark sky. Ahead of us, the dunes sloped down, overgrown with grass and furze, and the endless murmur of the sea hung on the edge of hearing. The ocean lay black beyond the dunes, the bulk of Rathlin Island dimly seen in the distance, its tip marked by the red flash of a warning beacon.

Of course in the shadow of the building it was pitch black, even as the moon shone more and more brightly. People brought out cellphones, and someone had a wind-up torch. Emmaline presided over the grill, while Phil and I brought out the meat in stages, and Rachel and Allie put the meat and buns together. No tables or anything, so Allie held the bowl of cheese and other condiments, while Rachel was in charge of the buns. We all huddled around the grill in a tight circle, as close to the warmth as we could get. Laughing, joking, general craziness: the cold night air seemed to have gone to everyone's heads. Someone had gone to buy drinks, and they handed around bottles of soft drinks since we'd forgotten to bring down cups. We ate the hot food right off the grill, sizzling and scorching our fingers. The wind curled around the corner of the building, kicking the sparks up into our faces, and making the grease drippings flare on the hot coals. The moonlight beyond the shadow of the building grew brighter and brighter. When everyone had had enough meat, Steve brought out bananas, marshmallows, and chocolate buttons in little aluminum foil packets, and put them on the grill. We toasted marshmallows, and when the desserts were cooked, we ate them hot off the gril, scraping the sticky mess out of the foil with plastic forks.

When we were done eating, everyone still stood around the warm fire. Laughing, talking, singing.... People tossed out campfire tunes, pop songs, snatches of hymns, lines from musicals, and joined in cheerfully (but tunelessly).

Eventually, Steve, Phil, and Rachel decided that it was time to go. Some of the boys went and got sand to use to douse the fire; the rest of us packed up the plastic bags with the remnants of our feast. The long trek up the hill to the cars seemed to last forever, winding up the hill on the pitted gravel road, hauling the bags, with the dark furze bushes on either side, and the moonlight making a lane between them. A couple of car-loads went on back to the hostel, but Emmaline, Rachel, Steve, and I waited around for Phil to come up from clearing up the grill. Nathan put on the dance music, and Emmaline and Rachel danced around the car park, their shadows sprawled ridiculously in the moonlight as they moved to the beat. We drove back to the hostel and sat around in the common room, where we looked at everyone's pictures from the afternoon. Lots of laughter, of course. Rachel's group, with Nathan and the two Stevens in it, had taken some absolutely ridiculous videos, and everyone clapped for Emmaline's underwater picture. "You're a living legend!" Rachel said. When we'd seen all the pictures, I went to bed. Claire and Emma (Wednesday night small group, second year; arrived this evening) came in, too, and whispered and giggled.