This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking 50 students from Charlottesville High School on a fall retreat in the beautiful mountains of Goshen, Virginia. For two days, they got away from Charlottesville, turned off their phones and spent time fully engaged with one another. Though they were only together for 36 hours, many of the relationships the kids formed were stronger than ones they’ve made throughout the entirety of the school year.
The experience boils down to one word: connection.
This weekend, high school students were given the chance to forget about all of the things that distract them and make connecting so difficult. For two days, they were able to set aside barriers of technology, status, popularity and superiority. They were able to briefly forget about issues they face at school and home. They were able to escape the exhausting task of being a 21st-century teenager. They were allowed to simply be themselves.
On the second night of the retreat, 20 minutes were dedicated to quiet reflection time, followed by an hour-long discussion on relationships, fears, joys, hope, faith and doubts. Sitting with one of my best friends, a senior girl at Charlottesville High School, my heart broke as she expressed to me how incredibly scared she was to go home the next morning.
“This weekend has just been so wonderful,” she said. “When we’re here, everyone cares about each other so much. Everyone wants to be friends and not just friends that hang out, but friends who really know what’s going on in each other’s lives, and who really care to invest in their relationships. And then we go back home and everything changes. It all fades. It’s like we forget the connections we made and we just go back to our lives like nothing happened.”
I hated hearing this, but I knew it was true because I experienced it myself many times before. When we peel away the outer layers of our lives and focus entirely on love, everything changes. We are filled up and we find ourselves wholly connected to each other — and we can’t wait to return to our regular lives with a renewed energy, with a new set of important relationships to experience.
But every time we return home, these relationships struggle. Distractions creep in and we concentrate on our other, seemingly more important, duties. And then, before we know it, we’re right back where we started: isolated, broken and disconnected.
I am still trying to figure out what it takes to keep this joy, peace and love with me through the monotony and the business of the every day. Yes, the feelings will fade in time, but I am determined to hold on, to keep the connection as long as I possibly can. And as I return home, I hope and pray that these 50 incredible high school students, who want nothing more than to be loved and cared for, are able to remember what they experienced this weekend when their hearts were calmed, their minds balanced and their relationships whole. And I hope they run after this fullness and love every single day for the rest of their lives.
Peyton’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at p.williams@cavalierdaily.com.
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