Sensing Jesus: A Laity Lodge Retreat

I'm super excited to share the news that Lore Wilbert and I will be leading a retreat at Laity Lodge this coming October 12-15, titled "Sensing Jesus."

We've both written books on the body: Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry (Lore) and A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship (me).

We both care deeply about the bodily dimension of the gospel and what it means to live into the embodied grace of God. We both know from firsthand experience the wounds that a body incurs.

And we both wish to offer to others a physically meaningful experience of Jesus in our life and work.

At this retreat, we'll be exploring the significance of our five senses—sight, sound, scent, touch and taste—to our spiritual formation. As it states on the Laity Lodge web page:

"Throughout his public ministry, Jesus heals people’s bodies in order to restore to them the ability to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch the good gifts of God’s creation.

He reverses the de-sensitizing and dehumanizing effects of sin, and re-sensitizes people to the abundant life of God.

Drawing on the story of the wedding at Cana, we’ll explore how God delights to use all of our senses in order to transform our humanity and to enable us to be agents of Christ’s embodied grace to those who hunger for the wedding feast of the Lamb."

We're going to make it interactive and sensory-rich, which means that it will not be a sit-in-your-chair and think-only-thoughts-with-your-brain retreat.

It's going to be a "taste and see that the Lord is good" retreat.

It's going to be a "smell the flowers" and sense the intoxicating presence of God retreat.

It's going to be a "touch-feely" retreat so that folks might get in touch with the One who takes on flesh and moves into the neighborhood of our humanity, so that we might get a feel for God in the mundane aspects of our lives.

It's going to be a super fun retreat, in short.

And the fact that Jon Guerra and his wife Valerie will be there, too, playing music from their most recent album, “Ordinary Ways,” and leading us in worship, only makes it a supersonically more fun retreat.

You can sign up for the retreat here.

Let the feast begin!

Cody F. Miller, "Manna" (Exodus 16-1-7)