This past Monday and Tuesday we had our second annual Couples Retreat for the church. It was the two main days for Carnival here so we decided to take advantage of the holiday and have the retreat. This year once again we had it outside of the city in a hotel conference center called Casa Campestre or Country Home and although it was in the country you can tell from the pictures that it is a beautiful place. This year we had Pastor Miguel Murillo from Arequipa Peru with us to do the retreat. We started on Sunday at church with regular services but preaching on the family and marriage and then Monday and Tuesday we had classes (at the conference center) from 9:00 am to around 6:30 pm with breaks for lunch etc. On Sunday morning we had a great crowd with the church almost full and then on Monday there were 14 couples that came for the classes and on Tuesday we had 12 couples. The interesting thing was that almost half of the couples were vistors that were not even part of the church. As a result several made the comment that they were going to come to church this coming Sunday. The main theme of the conference was “Rescuing your Marriage” where Pastor Miguel taught about how the main need for men is respect and that the main need for women is love. (Eph. 5:33) Our problem usually is that we say “When she starts respecting me I will start showing her love” and she says “When he starts showing me love I will start showing him respect” and it turns into a vicious cycle that can only be broken when one says “I will do might part even if the other does not”. We truly had a great time and I am very thankful to Pastor Miguel for coming over and being such a blessing to us.
