June 8, 2012 - THE COTTAGE

We will begin our sabbatical by flying out on Sunday, July 1. Then, for a week we’ll be with Walt and Francoise Becker at The Cottage, a marriage retreat center on Coronado Island.  Walt and Francoise are counselors who specialize in working with clergy couples to repair and/or strengthen marriages. We’ll be the only couple there that week and we’ll probably be the healthiest couple they’ll ever see.

Why in the world would we want to do this?  The goals are simple: 

(1) to do a marriage “check-up,” (2) to consider ways we can stay healthy individually and connected as a couple while both of us practice our stressful vocations, and, (3) to begin to look to the future to see what five years from now might look like, and ten years and twenty.

We know what you’re thinking.  We have completely lost our minds!  Spending an hour with a marriage counselor is terrifying, who in the world would choose to spend an entire week?

Okay, we admit to some trepidation. More earlier than now and less than the hope we have that this will be a wonderful experience. 

The irony of the marriage check-up part is they had us take the Prepare/Enrich instrument that I’ve administered to hundreds of couples in pre-marital.  They’ll use that and the other information we sent them to “look under the hood” of our marriage. That will be fun.

Staying connected in our daily lives is a vital priority.  As our friend, Wes Rohrer, explained to us years ago, both of our jobs involve non- profits, and lots of stress. They both involve illness and death, and they are both “endless and boundless.”  That is, there is never enough time to get done all that needs to be done. It’s impossible, so how are you going to deal with it?  We hope to learn some ways to deal with it.

Then there’s the looking ahead into the future part.  We are like most people in that we don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to think about what retirement will be like for us, where we want to live, what we want to do and what the timing could be.  So, we hope to spend some of our hours thinking about such things.

We finish at The Cottage on Friday and then transfer to a B & B on Coronado Island for four days of decompression. We plan on walking the beach, watching the Fourth of July fireworks, going to the San Diego zoo, just being tourists. 

We ask for your prayers, that this whole experience will be as joyful and transformative as we expect it to be.