1. 20 June 2010 · 04:53 PM ·

    June 4-5.

    Relationship Overnight Retreat at Dogwood Camp.

    I was looking forward to this weekend. I had met with Jason prior in the week and saw all the cool creative things we would be participating in over the course of the weekend. Jason is a pastor at a church here in Chattanooga. He grew up in Chicago and is now married here in TN.  He was head of the government funded group called First things First. So our whole weekend was funded by uncle sam, but managed and guided by Jason. It was cool because the grant allowed for the project to happen but they didn’t try to control the project. So Jason got to use his life experiences along with those on his team and harness his creativity to make this program all it could be. Thank God, Uncle SAM didn’t put it together. We’ve already seen how boring and ineffective our public school systems are. 

    The weekend went great after it was all said and done. I feel like the youth got a lot out of it. I really like all the materaial. It was real, it was interesting and it was fun. I wish I would have had a program like this in high school.

    It was also good to have some small group time with the guys in my youth group. I talked to the high school guys and then the middle school guys. My whole philosophy on relationships as well in life is: “If you concentrate on the do’s, the don’t will almost always take care of themselves.” I mean seriously, think about it. If you concentrate on purity, waiting till marriage to have sex will take care of it’s self. If you concentrate on spending quality time together and engaging in healthy relationships, most of the temptations will weed themselves out. If you learn to appreciate the anticipation and not rush things, to take things slow and let love run it’s course, then your likely to have a stronger, more motivating, healthy relationship. I coined the phrase a while ago called, “Healthy growth”. If you focus your mind on real relationships, not only in love but in life, and you discipline yourself to surround yourself with people that will build you up and hold you accountable then you highly increase your chances of becoming a better person. Taking steps like these highly increase your chance of success. 

    Think about it, if you have surrounded yourself with people who eat right and work out and who hold you accountable for yuor actions then you will be a better person. You will WANT to go work out. You will WANT to eat healthy. You will engage in becoming the person you were meant to be. Your friends will call you out for being mediocre. It will be unacceptable for you to be anybody then the great person inside of you that is ready to come out.

    Same goes with relationships. Surround yourself with people who will bring you up. Get advice from wise people who you would like to be like one day. Find the couple in your community that you always see with smile on there face and ask them to have you over for dinner and pick their brains. They must be doing something right.

    In relationships we need to tunnel our vision to the do’s in our lives and not the don’ts.