Note: This post is part of a group writing project for HighCallingBlogs.com for this month sponsored by Laity Lodge and which we’re hosting here at SuccessCREEations, Inc. The topic is Retreat! Retreat! Retreat! While the main drawing has already happened you can still participate in the writing project until the end of the month and get a discount on selected retreats for you and your readers.

Connectivity Culture

We live in a culture that is continuously connected. I’m as connected as anyone because of what I do here at SuccessCREEations, Inc.

Between blogging, a bunch of email addresses, four instant messaging accounts, Skype, 300+ feeds in my feed reader, and all the various social media sites I’m active on it can be a never ending stream of information.

And it’s getting worse, or better, depending on your viewpoint. With services like Twitter that can follow you around on your cell phone it is easier than ever to keep yourself wired in.

Out of the Vacation Habit

I grew up in a family where most all vacation time was spent going to visit family, usually over holidays. Most of you would probably agree that visiting family often isn’t really a vacation at all. Sometimes it can be even more stressful than every day life!

Gorgeous is from a family that had more healthy vacation habits. But unfortunately in our marriage we’d fallen into my way of doing things what with parental failing health issues and all.

In the ten years of our marriage we can only remember one real vacation where we weren’t visiting family or attending a conference or some such.

Making an Occasion Special

As we were coming up on our 10th wedding anniversary this spring we decided we wanted to take a trip to get away an mark the occasion in a special way. We wanted to take a long weekend and go someplace different.

We chose Colorado because we’d never been to the mountains together. With my career working around the ships we’ve always been pretty tied to the coast. To someone in the low country of Savannah the Rocky Mountains are decidedly different.

I think the last time they had snow here was like in 1989.

Our idea was to get to the mountains and get some downtime. I did bring my laptop and cell phone with the idea that I could do a little work along the way.

Fatboy and Lowrider thought it was a smashing plan and tried to get themselves packed in with our luggage so they could tag along. Gorgeous thought better of that idea and rousted them from the suitcase.

We ended up in Glenwood Springs and what attracted us to the place was that big old hot springs fed pool that stays toasty warm all year long. In the end we stayed pretty much disconnected from the internet, didn’t use the cell phone hardly at all.

What we did instead was spend a lot of time soaking in the natural beauty of the mountains. The two of us talked a lot, just the two of us, about all sorts of things and about not much at all.

We drove around and explored some new places. We had no agendas, woke up without an alarm clock, and found places to eat when we got hungry, and went to sleep when we were tired.

Along the way we found all sorts of interesting folks to talk with. It didn’t matter to us whether it was a waitress where we were having lunch or dinner, a shopkeeper in a gift shop, a fellow vacationer in the hot springs pool, the check out clerk in a major chain store, or the folks working at the tourist information center, we seemed to always find interesting people to connect with.

It was a tremendously refreshing weekend for both of us.

Take Aways

Here are some things I learned from that time away

• There are interesting people everywhere you go. Take the time to strike up a conversation.
• We had gotten way more stressed out than we realized. Looking back we realized that we’ve been through a very stressful couple of years without much of a break. But like the frog floating in the pot that doesn’t notice the heat being slowly turned up, we had no idea how much the stress had been building until we got away for a bit.
• We needed some perspective. Getting away helped us get a better perspective on what all we are facing in our lives. When we got back home our problems didn’t seem quite so overwhelming.
• We need to make vacations a regular part of our lives. Moving forward Gorgeous and I agreed that we will be carving out regular vacations from here on out. Besides, if God took a break after he made the universe, what am I doing thinking I can go wide open and never take a break?
• Seems like there’s two colors of dirt in Colorado, red and tan. Either one can be very dusty. And sometimes the color switches in a very clear cut line right down the side of a mountain.

OK. So that last one isn’t very profound. But it was something I learned out there.

So how do you see vacations? Do you take regular time to just get away? Or does all your vacation time get used on obligations like visiting family?

Have you ever had to chose whether to take some time away or keep pressing on?

Which way did you decide to go?

What happened as a result?

HighCallingBlogs Group Writing Project

This month we’re hosting the HighCallingBlogs Group Writing project here at SuccessCREEations, Inc.

We’re going to take the next few weeks to share some of we learned learned from a time when we decided to get away for a while, or from a time when we decided not to get away (but maybe we thought we should have).

Win Your Own Retreat

Laity Lodge is sponsoring the Group Writing Project this month. That means they are doing 3 things for those who decide to enter a blog post.

• 50% OFF FOR YOU – selected retreats for any participant in this group writing project. (You don’t have to be a member of HighCallingBlogs.com, but we hope you’ll consider it.)
• 25% OFF FOR YOUR READERS – Anyone who reads your blog can register for 25% off. When they call to register, they need to ask for “the HighCallingBlogs.com discount.”
• A FREE RETREAT – On Friday, May 9, at noon Central Time, we’re going to put the names of this Group Writing Project’s participants in a hat and draw one out. The winner gets a free retreat for a married couple or an individual. Marcus will announce the winners that afternoon

How to Enter

To enter for your chance to win, or to just participate in the writing project you need to do three things:

1. Write up a blog post on the importance of retreat
2. Link to the sponsor, Laity Lodge
3. And also link to this post so I know to include your post in the list of submissions that will be accumulating right here.

We’ll also post a link to your post over at HighCallingBlogs.com!

Update: Mark pulled a winner for the free retreat! Check out the video to see who one. But just because the winner has been chosen doesn’t mean that the project is over because we can all still be winners. Remember you can still get 50% off of selected retreats just for submitting your blog post to this group writing project and your readers can still get 25% off. So if you’re like me and haven’t submitted a post yet, there’s still time to be included. Keep writing!

1. Journeys by L.L. Barkat shows us that they can sometimes “Turn things upside down and sideways. Take us away, only to bring us home with a new perspective.“
2. Only the Strong Retreat and Surrender by Kathy Hansen, sharing with us a quiet moment alone on a porch.
3. Sacred Ingress by Carl Holmes reminds us of the overpowering scale that can be found at the edge of a powerful ocean.
4. Retreat to Appreciate by L.L. Barkat reminds us of the transcending beauty of nature that longs to be appreciated.
5. A Listening Prayer by Gordon Atkinson points out the simplicity and value of being quiet and listening to the world around us for a time. (And it just so happens the moment he described happened on my birthday a few years back!)
6. Retreat – Get a Handle on God’s Design by Marcus Goodyear holds up a warning sign to church folk who get all caught up in tidy rules instead of the complex reality. Getting a way for a while can help us maintain our balance.
7. Asleep I Sang With the Body of Christ in Retreat by Samuel Adams (I’m sorry but that’s a totally cool name!) points out the difference between a retreat and a vacation. It never occurred to me that they may not be the same thing.
8. Retreat by Tina Howard shares about a time she set some time aside to decompress with a group that was preparing to head overseas.
9. The Power of Retreat by Robert Hruzek gives us an example of how attending a retreat might totally change the direction of our lives as it led to Robert meeting his wife. For me this post was especially interesting because Gorgeous and I met at a singles retreat ourselves. Funny how things work out sometimes.
10. Retreat Retreat Reretreat… at Home by Mary DeMuth reminds us that sometimes just breaking our normal routine can be as refreshing as getting away somewhere.
11. Monastic Practices for Modern Christians by J. Dodson describes a place where he used to retreat when he lived in Boston. Now that he’s in Austin he’s looking for someplace similar. Anyone got any ideas for him?
12. Retreats, why? by Gerrard Fess offers a fabulous top 10 list of the benefits of getting away for a bit.
13. Come! Charge! Retreat! by Robin Bryce makes a good point that retreating is a contingency that any battle plan should allow for.
14. Celebrating My Recessive Retreat Gene by Tom Petersen is a great post explaining the difference between laziness and a retreat. Tom got me laughing. Something about mud…
15. Secure Your Own Mask First by Cheryl Smith brings up the reality that we won’t be much help to others if we don’t care for ourselves. Cheryl offers some good suggestions on how to maximize your time away.
16. Colossians and Creation by Heather Goodman recounts a time of reflection while sitting on a bench in the woods near some water.
17. It’s God Who Draws Us to Retreat by A. Anjeanette Brown shares some insights from going on a trip as well as ideas on how to retreat when life’s demands wont let you go to someplace new.
18. ~Retreat, Retreat, Retreat~ by Duane Smith reveals how conversation can develop when we get away long enough to listen.
19. The Symbol on the Rock by Brandon Satrom shows us a glimpse of remarkable beauty found at 12,000 feet one day.
20. Retreat Retreat Retreat by Sally Ferguson is a confession of a retreat junkie. Sally shares some new things she learned one time at Mount Rainier.
21. The Get Away by David Rupert points out that we’ve got a tremendous example before us of one who made regular time away a part of his life.
22. Value in Getting Away by Yours Truly where I share how I learned down time is important after years without any vacations.

Blog Network

The High Calling Blogs is a new faith based blog network that is setting out to explore the intersection of faith in the workplace. Here’s an excerpt from their about page:

TheHighCalling.org seeks to connect people with the faith that undergirds and sustains all that we do. That’s why it is the high calling of our daily work. Daily work embraces all aspects and activities of daily life—including home, community, leisure, as well as occupation.

There are two options for someone who wants to join the High Calling Blog community.

First, if you already have a blog where you write about your work you can request to add your blog to the network. Then place one of the High Calling Blogs network badges on your site like the one above or the one on my right side bar and your blog will be included in one of their categories so that your feed will be added to their feed aggregator and shared with the rest of the network.

Here’s a list of the categories they have blogs in already.

• Business
• Creative Arts
• Devotion
• Education
• Marriage
• Nonprofit
• Parenting
• Pastors
• Publishing/Writing
• Science/Medicine
• Technology

In addition they hope to add Government, Law and Military categories as the network expands..

“I don’t have a blog”

Here is the best part. Remember I said there are two ways to join the network?

If you don’t have a blog already and want to get started on a great easy to use platform (WordPress) you can join the network using the second way. You can simply register with High Calling Blogs and start your very own blog hosted on their network.

For FREE!

That’s right. You can begin blogging right away. High Calling Blogs will pay the server fees for hosting, and bandwidth.

It’s a low risk way to join the community and get started blogging for those who are interested in exploring that intersection of faith and work.

Joining to Help

In my case I’ll be doing more with High Calling Blogs than just sharing my blog posts. I’ve been asked to join the team.

So now, along with Marcus Goodyear and Gordon Atkinson I’ll be helping with the ongoing improvements to the High Calling Blogs community experience.

I’ll be adding my technical know how and WordPress expertise to help smooth out the user experience. Initially I’ll be helping them dig out and catch up on bringing new members into the community.

Over time I’ll be working on the technical behind the scenes stuff that will improve the overall community experience. Because the network is powered by WordPress MU (the multi-user version) many of the WordPress tips and tricks that I post here will be helpful to the community.

Occasionally I’ll post some High Calling Blogs specific information and announcements here at SuccessCREEations too.

The good news for all you regular readers is that now I have a reason to post more regularly here. I won’t feel like posting is a luxury any more and can prioritize my own blogging guilt free.

So go on over and check out the High Calling Blogs and let us know what you think.