Greetings from the road and happy New Year!!

We, Retreat Team 1, are so happy to be back on the road! Being home for the Christmas break with our families was awesome! It was nice to be back home and to recharge and then coming back and going through a week of training with renewed energy. We are very excited to be back and doing ministry. 

We started the month on a slower note with time to prepare for the ministry ahead. We worked on refining all the things that make up our retreats. We worked on improving our talks, which we use to deliver the main content of our retreat’s theme. As a team, we also worked on skits and games. These are also a crucial part of the ministry and help the youth to be comfortable and engaged. We also learned new dramas, which are usually used to represent the Gospel message or the retreats theme visually. It was a little hard to not be out doing ministry with youth, but we also knew that this aspect was important as well. Ecclesiastes 3:1 has this to say: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”. There is a time to be out with the youth and doing retreats, but there is also a time to prepare for the ministry and improve it. We now feel more ready and equipped than ever to go out and continue on with the second half of the year. 

In the second half of the month, we got to do some retreats for the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall. We also got to spend some time in Paris, Ontario (not France, unfortunately). During one of the retreats, one girl shared that she was very moved by one of our dramas and that she was really touched by how we conveyed the message of God’s love through it. This really helped us to realise the importance of those different seasons and that time that we had to prepare. We’re so thankful to have been able to see the fruit of our labour.

Outside of ministry, we got to spend some time with the other two NET teams before we all went our separate ways. We celebrated some birthdays all together and did activities all together like sledding, making fun songs, praising and worshiping together, and so on and so forth. We had an awesome time this month and in this season, and we are excited for what the rest of the year has in store!

God Bless,

Retreat Team 1 (Benedict, Serena, Ange, Marie-Anne, Moses, Peter, Rachel, Veronica)