Before and After

   This is a portrait of a feeling.
   Dry, alone, with a grey sky and a wide, clear but joyless path of duty before you.
   It's even off-center with stuff in the way. The path is clear enough, but there's bothersome little STUFF in front of you.
   Ever been here?
   This past weekend, i have "worked a Discipleship Walk."  My family knows that, along with the other STUFF i've been doing, it's pretty well consumed all of me in the days  and weeks leading up to the weekend, and i came home Sunday afternoon exhausted.  i dropped the luggage in the living room, collapsed in a chair, then dragged myself to bed for a three hours, dead to the world.
   Why would anyone do something like this?
   Joy.
   The Discipleship Walks that i participate in are a small part of the worldwide Christian Cursillo movement, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursillo.  They go by various names, and are associated with various parts of the body of Christ, aka denominations.  Some are explicitly about the sponsoring church, others explicitly nondemoniational. These weekends are not about conversion.   The Disciples who come on the Walk learn, through talks and experience, the nuts & bolts of Christian life in a way that they've likely never known before, even if they've lived as a Christ-follower for decades. 
   It's exhausting, it's fun way better than an amusement park, it's joyful.  There's ALWAYS more than enough to eat.  Sleep, maybe not so much, but you're only seriously sleep deprived if you don't go to bed when you get the chance.

And the view along the path is a lot more like this now.