Ruth Haley Barton - Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away with God

If you dont come apart for a while,

you will come apart after a while.

One of the reasons I love a good invitation is that I get tired of being told what to do. As the very responsible oldest daughter of a pastor and someone who entered vocational ministry at a young age, my life has been shaped by a strong sense of what I had to do, what I needed to do, and what I ought to do, according to a lot of other peoples expectations. And there is nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But these days I find a good invitation to be much more compelling than responsibility. To be invited into something that is right for me and to have the chance to choose freely, well, that is an entirely different experience! With a true invitation, there is no coercion, no forcing, no guilting, no manipulationjust a winsome opportunity, an openhearted welcome and the freedom to say yes or no.

An invitation means that I really do have a choice, and I just love that!

The other thing that is simply wonderful about a good invitation is that it means I am wanted. For some of us the desire to be wanted is closer to the surface than it is for others, but no matter how buried it might be, the desire to know we are appreciated, accepted, and desired is a fairly universal human longing. Our awareness of this longing and our experiences with how this desire was met (or not) go way back and may shape us even now. We all have early memories of knowing something special was going ona bunch of girls having a sleepover, a birthday party for one of the cool kids, a group of guys playing baseball or street hockeyand experiencing the sting of realizing we were not invited. We might remember the grade school excitement of being invited to someones house after school and looking forward to it all day or the sting of not being invited when others have been.

As we grew into adolescence, we may have felt the security of being included in a group of good friends or the emptiness of being on the outside. We might have waited breathlessly for an invitation to an upcoming dance, or we may have been the one doing the asking and waiting breathlessly for that persons response. Perhaps we yearned to be part of the cast for a major production, to be on the football team, or even invited to be a special helper to a teacher we liked. Whatever our experiences have been, we know instinctively that to be invited means we are wanted and, in the very best scenario, wanted by someone we find interesting, intriguing, or just plain cool.

And that is exactly what makes the invitation to retreat so compelling. It is a winsome call from this intriguing person we call Godthe One who loves us, the One who is inexplicably drawn to us, the One who knows so intimately what we need in order to be well. It is an invitation straight from the heart of Jesus to ushis enthusiastic disciples who routinely wear ourselves out with good things and with lesser things, and we dont even know were doing it half the time! Taking on too much at work without prioritizing, thinking I can be the savior of all who are convinced they need time with me, making commitments I cannot possibly keep without running myself into the ground, reacting and responding to every need as though it were mine to fix, trying to be perfect and never disappointall of these compulsive behaviors ensure I will never come away and rest awhile.