The weekend was long and hard and exhausting. The retreat team, a group of ten amazing people, worked for five weeks to put together a weekend that would open the teenagers’ minds and hearts. But they just weren’t receptive to it. I’m used to dealing with a couple of closed minds at a time, but there were more than a couple. The more we tried to reach out, the more the kids pushed us away. It wore us out.<\/p>\n
These aren’t bad kids. But maybe they’re having a rough time at home, maybe they’re starving for attention, maybe they’re too scared to let us know what’s really going on in there. They just didn’t realize that it feels so much better to let go and open up than to hold on tight and close yourself off to the world. They haven’t learned that yet, and they weren’t ready to.<\/p>\n
Before we left the camp Sunday morning, Mark, one of the leaders, handed every person three seeds. These three seeds, he told us, were reminders that ideas, lessons and dreams were planted inside of us. “You may not see it now,” he said, “You may not see it until next week, or next month, or a few years from now, but those seeds are growing inside you.”<\/p>\n
I thought about how doing something nice for someone else is also like planting a seed. It disappears into the soil, and you trust that it is there ready to grow. You don’t have to sit there and wait for it. You just have faith that it will happen. You believe it.<\/p>\n
I bought a bunch of daffodils last night. They were only 99 cents. I wasn’t sure they’d blossom, because they looked faded and dry, but I put them in water when I got home, anyway.<\/p>\n
By the time I woke up this morning, they were already blooming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The weekend was long and hard and exhausting. The retreat team, a group of ten amazing people, worked for five weeks to put together a weekend that would open the teenagers’ minds and hearts. But they just weren’t receptive to it. I’m used to dealing with a couple of closed minds at a time, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maganda.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}