No phone, no Xbox, no iPod. No communication with the outside world for two days. I thought “this couldn’t be so bad”. I didn’t want to take confirmation class but my mom was making me. I wanted no part in it. I had to go at least 2 Sundays a month and those are fantasy football days. This coming weekend had to be the worst of them all. A church retreat. I told her “I’d rather not go mom.” She just told me to have an open mind about it. I call up my friend Colin and ask him about what he thinks. He thinks it will be fun. So I guess I will give it a try.

We take a bus an hour away, to the middle of some woods. “Looks like there’s no escaping.” We get settled into our rooms. We then go to a meeting to discuss the rules. ‘It doesn’t sound like too bad of trip’.

We split into groups of 5 or 6. My group isn’t bad, don’t have any of my close friends in it. However, I like meeting and learning about new people. We get to know each other a little bit before we go off and play a game. I think “They’re actually pretty cool.” It felt weird not having my phone on me but it wasn’t a bad weird. It felt good to not be able to check my phone. It felt good to get away from it.

The game we played was fun. We ran around trying to find one of the senior leaders that was on the trip. She could move anywhere throughout the 4 story house. Once we got the word from her we ran back to our groups and had to draw a picture of what the word was. Once they got it another member went to find her. We repeated this until we got all 10 words. We competed against the other groups. It was more fun than checking twitter every two minutes.

Free time was the best. We got an hour or so to do whatever we wanted. We got together with all our friends and hung out. It was a good time to just relax and talk. This part of the trip wasn’t too bad.

We end the night with church and then reading some letters that our close friends and family wrote to us. Each letter reminded me that no matter what I do, my family is always proud of me. I realize that I don’t need social networks or a phone all the time. There are times for a phone and not times for a phone. This retreat helped me realize the difference between these times.

This retreat helped me learn that everyone has obstacles in life and mine so happen to be that I used to spend too much time on my phone and iPod. There are more important things in life then stuff like that. Not a tweet telling everyone what I ate for dinner. I overcame these challenges by taking a side step before I left the retreat and realized that those objects aren’t that important. When I put these things aside I can achieve anything.