This weekend my wife and I went on a marriage retreat sponsored by our church. It was the culmination of an eight-week course called "Legacy of Love." We met on Tuesday nights and talked about issues like the fundamental differences between men and women, the different ways in which we hear and express love, and the challenges of meshing differing personality types. There were some 17 couples in the class, married for anywhere from less than a year to nearly thirty, some on second marriages, some with grown kids, some with lots of young kids, some with none. It was surprising how similar our challenges are notwithstanding our differing backgrounds. It's been amusing to note people's reaction when I tell them we're attending a marriage seminar or retreat. Many assume that we must be experiencing some sort of crisis in order to take such measures. In truth, we were there in hopes of making a good marriage better.
The retreat was held at a Methodist conference and retreat center called "Simpsonwood" outside of Atlanta. It's a beautiful 400-acre site that runs along the banks of the Chattahoochee River.
On Friday afternoon the schedule allowed for a few hours of free time, and my wife and I used some of that time to take a run together along the Simpsonwood trails. It's been a late leaf season this year, and this past weekend was the height of color. It was as if God reserved his palate for a weekend when we'd be spending a lot of time outside.
I run quite a bit faster than my wife, which is among the several reasons that we rarely run together. But I wisely concluded that given the focus of the weekend, I could afford to let my wife take the lead and set the pace so that we could stay together. The main trail was marked with white blazes, but at several intersections with other trails the blazes were strangely absent. We would pause, discuss the best route, and push forward. Sometimes we were right, but a few times we ran for several minutes before concluding we were headed in the wrong direction, so we'd backtrack, chose the next most obvious route and press ahead. After a few such wrong turns, we'd lost all sense of how long we would be running, or how long it would take for us to make it make to the room. More than once, we found ourselves covering ground we thought we'd already put behind us, twice passing a chapel that served as one of the few manmade landmarks along the way.
Wrong turns and backtracking normally frustrate me, but this time I didn't care. We had time, it was a beautiful day, and I wasn't alone. I knew that somehow or another we'd make it back. We spent a lot of the time talking about our marriage and the other marriages represented on the retreat, about our kids, our goals and more mundane things like our plan for our oldest son's birthday party the next day. It was a pleasant run. It was a great run, in fact. I have no idea how far we went, and even lost track of how long we ran, but we ran the whole way together, and I was disappointed when we suddenly emerged from the woods and found ourselves back at the dormitory.
Our run was like living out an overly obvious allegory. We had to pace ourselves because we really didn't know how long we'd have to run. We took time to enjoy the natural beauty around us. We didn't get too worried, we cooperated in our decision-making, we never blamed if the chosen path proved to be incorrect. I enjoyed even the wrong turns because I was with her. In fact, as long as I was with her, they weren't wrong turns at all, because she's the one I was ultimately after.
My life is full of "wrong turns", but with a different perspective I suspect that I could receive them more like the ones that I experienced on Friday. The key is to remember what I'm running after.
