Radically Altered Retreat - Day 2 Session 1

We began Saturday morning with breakfast, worship and prayer. We spent time praying for all the concerns that we brought into the retreat with us. Once we had shared our joys and concerns and prayed for them, we moved into the rest of the session.

I began by sharing out of John's Gospel (8:1-11) and talking about grace given to both the accusers and the woman in the text. Afterward, I shared my own testimony in light of the text we had examined (you can read part 1 here and part 2 here) .

As I was wrapping up the session, I played Brandon Heath's video "I'm not who I was" (the testimonial version) for them to watch.

As a response to what they had experienced, I invited them to participate in a poster board testimony in which everyone was given a piece of poster board and invited to write something about their lives prior to encountering God's grace and on the other side write something about their lives since their encounter with God's grace.

Once everyone had an opportunity to write, I played Brandon's song again (just audio) and invited folks to come up and share both sides of their poster boards. It was an incredibly powerful moment.

Below you will see the pictures of the poster boards that were made. To protect anonymity and to keep the space safe, we purposely didn't photograph the participants showing their own poster boards. We did, however, get permission of all of the participants to share them anonymously. So here they are (the first half of the slide show is the who I was before grace statements and the second half of the slide show is the after grace statements):



The power of personal testimony is incredible. It allows us to see the grace of God in our own lives and in the lives of others. It also draws a community together like nothing else I know (recognizing that we are all sojourners in grace).

How has your life been changed by grace? If you are up to it, we would love to see your "I'm not who I was" phrases in the comments (you can even comment anonymously if you like). In responding, please first write who you were before grace, then an ellipse (...), and then who you are now on the other side of that encounter with God's grace. It might look something like this:

Broken...whole
addicted...free
abandoned...unconditionally loved

What are yours?