Minutes to Memories

If my goal for our church's "leadership retreat" was to take our elders, deacons, and full-time ministers to a crappy hotel, spend several hours meeting together in a dark, gloomy, and trashy meeting room (pictured above during a break), and get very little sleep due to the rowdy drunken construction worker party outside our rooms, then this weekend has been a stunning success.

But that really wasn't my goal going in...

We stayed at this exact same hotel two years ago for the exact same retreat, but something must have changed with Hurricane Katrina.

Just a few snippets...
* On arrival, only 4 of our 6 room keys actually worked.
* The former conference room is now a bar.
* From a distance, the bar seemed to have better lighting and custodial attention.
* The clock in my room didn't work because the end of the cord consisted of frayed wires instead of a handy plug-in.
* Nor could we get a wake-up call since our phone didn't work.
* One room had no clean towels. Upon asking for clean towels, Ron was told that they didn't have any.
* In the middle of the drunken party next to his room, Norton went to the front desk and found the Security Guard sitting there. When informed of the drunken party, the security guard responded, "I know."
* Words can't describe the conference room. Not even the picture above.

Could be worse, They told us there was a wedding coming in today... :-)

I hope it wasn't a complete waste of time, however. I did put quite a bit of work into the retreat, although there is never enough time to plan as well as I would like. I felt like I talked too much, but in spite of that, I think some important points were made and important plans were begun.

So we'll see what happens...

I still wonder if Jesus ever came back from one of his outings with his buddies and thought, "Man, that just sucked."