It may be raining (without the slightest inclination of ever stopping) here in Tennessee, but it’s a good weekend and I’m in the company of good people.

I’m here at the Lakeside Resort near Smithville, with a couple of dozen men from the Blakemore United Methodist Church in Nashville, for the annual BUMMs spiritual retreat. “BUMMs” stands for Blakemore United Methodist Men.

This morning I shared the following (apocryphal) story from my childhood. “One day, in the face of mounting evidence that my high school academic career was essentially on the rocks, my mother said, ‘You’d better be careful, Derek, or one day you’ll wake up and find yourself in a roomful of bums.’ Well, gentlemen, here I am.”

PRIVILEGE: It’s a great privilege to get on an airplane, fly to another state, and drive into the hills for the solitary purpose of encouraging a group of men in their commitment as Followers of the Way of Jesus.

The person who gets encouraged the most is – typically – me. Because it’s a hard and fast principle that telling other people about what God is doing in my life serves as both an affirmation and a confirmation.

This is why I’m an enthusiastic believer in always asking the question, “Tell me what’s going on in your relationship with God?” Not what happened 20 years ago, or even last month, but tell me what’s going on right now.

Even when it’s a small story, just a momentary glimpse of God’s love in action, telling someone else about the experience always seems to open up more of God, and there’s immediately more to tell.

INTERACTIVE: The best retreats are always interactive. We may have the technology to put me in front of a camera at home and throw my image on a screen in Tennessee, but the “Derek speaking” part of this is only the smallest part of the experience. What counts is the community, person to person, the relational element of the weekend.

I see God most clearly when a man stands up to share what it means to say, “God loves me by heart,” or someone else asks the group to pray for him in an area where he is struggling, or one of the men says, “I feel connected to God because of the other men in this room….”

My role is simply to get the conversation started.

And I’m so thankful that my name continues to come up when men like the most excellent gathering of Nashville BUMMs make their plans.

– DEREK