The men’s retreat, bee keeping

Thursday a few men – six, including me – traveled from our church to Rose Bud, AR for a men’s retreat. We had a great steak dinner Thursday evening followed by a service featuring two preachers, Randy Dignan and Johnny Pope. It was a warm evening with wonderful fellowship and amazing preaching. Well worth the six-hour drive. I was able to visit with John Bishop, an aged preacher we had in for a youth conference in New Jersey years ago. Bro Bishop survived a bout of meningitis that left him with very little memory of his life and work prior to the sickness. It was inspiring to see him doing do well considering the state of his health when at our conference many years ago. We sat and visited for half an hour before the service Thursday evening. To give an example of his speech, he asked me what I did for work by saying, “What you do?” When I told him about the youth conference and how he inspired us that week, he asked, “Was I blessing?” I assured him he certainly was a blessing.

It was an unforgettable conference that year. The youth of our church had spent countless hours decorating the church to represent a medieval castle for the theme of being knights in service to the King. Mere hours before registration began for the conference the Fire Marshall told us we had to tear down all the decorations because he viewed it as a fire hazard. Very quickly everything was stripped from the walls and ceiling. Our teens were in tears when Bro Bishop arrived. When it was his time to preach, he was helped onto the stage by one of his sons. Looking at the deeply saddened teens of our church he started by saying, “Devil can take lot from you as Christian.” Then he pointed to a knight’s helmet sitting on a shelf by the podium where a speaker would normally have been setting and said, “But he never take the helmet of salvation from you.” The reaction of the crowd in the packed auditorium was a roaring cheer. It was one of the most impactful conferences we had ever had in our church.

Back to last weekend, Randy Dignan is a dynamo of a preacher and he preached several messages to us men. Very pointed, very direct messages about being a man in a culture that is trying to ridicule men in general and Christian men specifically. Johnny Pope is a clever, humorous and insightful preacher who is able to extract from scripture truths that are so profound they challenge a believer to search the scriptures more deeply. There is so much truth in those scriptures that has not yet been revealed to us in our personal studies and we tend to only discover that when we are instructed by a learned, consecrated man of God. That is why preaching is so fundamental to Christian growth. You cannot, even by revelation of the Holy Spirit, discover it all on your own. If you are to grow in the Lord, you must sit under good Biblical peaching – digging into the Word of God ever more deeply. Our pastor from West Virginia, Mike Norris preached the first sermon Friday evening as we sat shivering in our chairs.

We did man things at the conference like shoot skeet, compete with .22 rifles and blast potatoes from potato cannons to see who could shoot a potato the farthest. The winner sent a spud over 600 yards away. One of the men in our church placed second in one of the .22 competition categories, of which there were four. But he did not get a prize. Prizes were awarded to first place, tenth place and twentieth place. Just to mix things up. There was a corn hole tournament which did not finish up until after midnight Friday night. By that time the temperature was about 40° with a north wind blowing at more than 20 mph. We had sat through the entire service Friday evening – about 90 minutes for both preachers – in that cold wind in the open-air tabernacle. Very few men had prepared for that type of cold. Me included. I was chilled to the bone by the time I got back inside out cabin. The Saturday morning service was about the same temperature and condition, but we endured. We made it home about 5:30 Saturday evening. Because of the exposure to the cold I was struggling with my voice Sunday morning as I led the singing and it seemed that all the songs I had picked were very high. My bad.

Sunday afternoon a fellow beekeeper came over to help me with the bees. We opened all three hives and did a thorough inspection of each. On the one with the honey super he advised that we leave the honey super on the hive through the winter and allow the bees to eat the honey they had stored there. The honey super was less than half full so Mama and I would not have gotten much out of it. Plus, next Spring they will be further along with the frames that have honey in them now already filled with comb. The other two hives had not progressed much beyond where they were six weeks ago. I was disappointed in that, but they are on their way to getting the boxes filled. Next year we should be able to see a lot of progress. We treated for mites in each hive before closing the hive. I had to go back a couple hours later and insert a price of cardboard into a slot in the base that will block most of the cold air from entering through the screened hive bottom.