I am feeling excited about the 20th Annual Province IV HIV/AIDS Retreat at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina coming up in June. I chair the volunteer planning team that puts the event together and we take our work seriously! We are heading into the final phase of planning and will meet in a few weeks to get down to finalizing every little detail so that when we all experience the event, it will seem effortless.
Making it appear simple and easy is important because we want the folks who come to “Kanuga” (as we affectionately refer to it, as if ours was the only retreat ever held there) to feel the peace of God. We want them to come to the mountaintop and know that love and acceptance abound. We want them to take those feelings with them when they leave to enrich their lives at home.
Bringing together the beauty and tranquility of nature with ways in which people can see and experience the love of God is what the retreat is all about. Spiritual meditations led by deeply faithful and loving leaders, combined with joyful and buoyant music, meld beautifully. Add a healing service, an ice-cream social, a talent show and an early morning Holy Eucharist by the lake and…...you get the picture.
People who come feeling beaten and broken are lifted up. Folks who live in dire poverty and do without are fed and tended. People who give……receive, and those who receive…… give. Hugs abound! Smiles are heart-warming. God is there. Come and see.
For more information, visit the Province IV information page.
Lola Thomas serves on the NEAC board in the office of board chair. She became involved in AIDS ministry in 1991 and has served on the Diocese of Atlanta’s Task Force on AIDS ever since. In 1992, she helped institute an AIDS outreach program at her local parish, the Church of the Ascension in Cartersville, Ga., which later became incorporated as a community based non-profit, serving people living with HIV/AIDS. She remains the executive director of this organization, the AIDS Alliance of Northwest Georgia. After serving on the Planning Team for the Province IV Network of AIDS Ministries for many years, she became chair in 2008.
