The Ruckus Winter Retreat 2008
March, 2008

The Winter Retreat saw lots of new faces this year, as well as many returning ones. It was also the first winter retreat we’ve done that had both snow and a place to sled! The mark of a successful retreat is not always what happens during the weekend, but what changes can be seen in the following weeks in the lives of students. As a result of the retreat, several students who had never previously expressed any true change have stood up in church, testifying as to how Christ has set them free from their former lives of sin and how His great love really is enough, even for them!!

This year on the winter retreat, we dealt with the subject of betrayal. There were two main texts that we focused on, John 8:1-11 and Psalm 147:3. In the John 8 text, we equated the woman’s sin of adultery with the general idea of betrayal, since teenagers can better relate with being betrayed and betraying others than they can with committing adultery. The key issues we focused on were that everyone has been betrayed in this life and therefore, everyone could be like the Pharisees holding stones in their hands, ready to exact revenge for how they’d been wronged. However, we also demonstrated that even though everyone had been betrayed somehow, everyone has also betrayed others and therefore no one had a right to throw a stone. In fact, the only person who had every right to punish us for our acts of betrayal was and is Jesus Christ, but according to Romans 8, the very one who could condemn us chose instead to die for us, taking on the punishment we deserved and offering us safety and the freedom to live apart from sin! No matter how badly anyone has been hurt, betrayed, or destroyed, Psalm 147:3 still rings true, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” The students were challenged to see themselves not as the continual victims of injustice, but as betrayers who needed forgiveness; and Jesus Christ alone offers that hope. The last day, they were confronted with the same challenge that Jesus issued to the woman at the end of the story, to “Go, and from now on sin no more.”