Engaged Encounter

Greg and I just spent the weekend at an "Engaged Encounter." This is a retreat which the Catholic church mandates you go to before you can get married. I was kind of not looking forward to going, b/c I just wasn't in the koom-bay-ah kinda mood. BUT this wasn't that kind of retreat. There was very little group exercises or sharing, it wasn't preachy, and the "talks" weren't very long. Mostly the facilitators presented a topic (such as finances, children, conflict resolution), gave us some worksheets with questions, then gave us time to answer the questions individually and talk about the answers with each other. We got a chance to talk about some things that we hadn't thought of. Like how we are going to handle our money... and how our family of origin affected our views of marriage. The best part, was that I seriously think I got more one-on-one time with Greg than I've had in the last two months combined. It was really wonderful to just be around each other with no distractions.

Funny story. At the very end of the weekend, I was getting a little weary of "communicating" and was anxious to get back to work on my mid-term project. For the last activity they have you write a letter to each other that answers this question: After going through this weekend are you ready to spend the rest of your life with your partner and love them unconditionally?

They give you time to go off on your own and write, then you are supposed to join back up with your fiancee and trade letters. So I hurriedly wrote my letter to Greg and went to find him so we could exchange and get back to business. We plopped ourselves down on a curb outside of the meeting room and exchanged letters. I looked at his and barely got past the "Dear Peanut" before I jumped up and grabbed the seat of my jeans b/c something was stinging my butt. I looked down and there was a huge swarming ant pile right where I was sitting! I started to reach down my pants to get the ants out and realized there were ummm... people watching me. So I sprinted inside to the bathroom and had to shake out my jeans. There were ants all over the floor. Now I have about 15-20 ant bites on my rear and every few mintues I get this "feeling" that something is crawling on me.

Greg couldn't help but notice the irony, that I literally got "ants in my pants" when I was ready to go. God has a funny way of pointing things out. Maybe I should be more patient.