Are you
ready for story time with Bekah? This one takes us back to almost a year ago,
when I went on my first staff retreat with our church. They’ve been doing this retreat
for several years, but last fall was my first time to be officially on staff at
retreat time, and I was so excited to go. Spouses are invited (and encouraged!)
to attend, but we had just gotten back from our Mackinac Island trip last year,
and Ryan had some evening work commitments, so he couldn’t go with me.
One of the other ladies on our
staff was also on her own while her husband worked, so we shared a suite in the
retreat center. We each had our own bedroom, and we shared the Jack and Jill
bath.
We were gone two nights, and everything
went beautifully the first night. I didn’t sleep well, as is typical when I’m apart
from Ryan, but everything went well. The second night, right after dinner, my
suitemate became very sick, and she had to go home.
That night, I finally fell
asleep about 11:30. At 12:40 I the morning, I was jolted awake by slamming
doors right outside my door, heavy footsteps running down the hall, and lots of
deep voices talking. It was a terrifying way to wake up alone in a suite! My
first thought was that someone in the retreat center had a medical emergency
and EMS used the outside entrance not far from my room to enter the building.
That thought quickly moved out of my mind and I went straight to intruders. My
door was locked, but the doors don’t have peepholes, so I had no way to look
out into the hall. I wasn’t about to open the door in case the people in the
hall were intruders. The noises continued, and I was shaking and my heart
was racing.
I grabbed the phone and texted
Ryan that I was scared, but he did not respond. It didn’t surprise me, because
I didn’t imagine a text would wake him up. So I called. It went STRAIGHT to
voicemail without ringing. Well, that unlocked a new level of terror. We
never turn off our phones when we are apart, so I could not imagine any
scenario in this world that would send me straight to voicemail. There I was,
stuck alone in a room with something loud and scary happening in the hall, and
because my suitemate went home, I had no access to another person without
unlocking my door.
I tried to call Ryan again.
Straight to voicemail again. So while I would ordinarily NEVER do this at 12:45
in the morning, I texted one of my other coworkers, who was staying with her
husband across the hall from me. She didn’t answer. So I called. Yes, I sure
did. She told me when she answered that she had no idea why my call came through
because her phone was set up to block all night calls except her family. I was
certain Jesus sent my call through.
Though she hadn’t been awakened
like I had been, now that she was awake, she heard what I heard and sent
her husband out into the hall to check on the source. There was a group of high
school boys staying at the retreat center, and while none of us could imagine
why they were out at that hour, he was pretty certain they were the source of
the noise. I did not know that there was a gym in the lower level near our
rooms, so we presumed they had been playing there and were making their way
back to their rooms in another wing of the building.
That calmed me down about
intruders knocking down my door, but I still did not know why Ryan wasn’t
answering his phone!
Bridgette asked me if there was
any chance that his battery could have died. I hadn’t considered that but decided
it was plausible. His battery life wasn’t great, and I told myself that maybe
he fell asleep after we talked on the phone late that evening, and he just didn’t
plug in the phone…and then it died.
But by that point, I was wide
awake, pacing, shaking, crying, praying. I kept trying to call, every few
minutes, and eventually the phone did start ringing…but he still didn’t answer.
About two hours later, I finally
calmed down enough to get into bed without shaking violently. But I couldn’t sleep.
I would guess that I only had about an hour and a half of broken sleep all
night. I kept calling and texting…no response.
I was so scared that he’d had
some kind of medical emergency and no one was there to help him. I had no other
way to try to call him. I didn’t have a car at the retreat, or I absolutely would
have driven home in the middle of the night to look. I didn’t know who in our
group had the church van keys to borrow it to go home.
I checked his phone location, knowing
it isn’t always exactly accurate, and it said he was in the yard. I started
wondering if he got sick and tried to go for help and collapsed in the yard. It
was dark. Who would see him, even if they drove by?
I didn’t know what else to do
except keep praying and waiting.
Finally, at 6:30 in the morning,
he answered. I was sobbing. He was still trying to wake up and had no idea what
was happening. He had, in fact, forgotten to turn on his ringer after we talked,
and he slept through all the calls and texts – and all his alarms. We never did
figure out why, for a time, the phone went straight to voicemail.
He did feel absolutely terrible
about it. And later – MUCH later – it made a story we could giggle about. That
next day was NOT that day.
But now that you know this
story, I am sure you can understand why this year, he went with me. And I was
so happy to have him there.
I decided to save my stories
from this year’s retreat for another post. You’re probably exhausted from this
story!!
This concludes story time with
Bekah.
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