15 highlights from my weekend retreat

For all of you that have been following my tweets, you were aware that last Saturday and Sunday I was away at a men's only retreat.  The theme of the retreat was the "covenant" and how we as men must be people of the covenant, commited to serving God through our respective vocations and unique masculine attributes.  Here are 15 highlights of the retreat:

• "Social Community is never conferred upon man as a gift but proposed to him as a task to be fulfilled."  John Paul II
• The devil fosters disunity, fatigue, isolation
• True Christian friendship is the perfect anecdote to these tactics by the devil
• We as men must combat the temptation of weariness and fatigue by meeting regularly with our brothers
• We "As brothers in the Lord" must also keep meeting and praying for and with one another
• CS. Lewis, in his work The Four Loves spoke about the intrinsic value of true friendship by saying, "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value;rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival."
• Modern American society is growing more and more isolated. This trend has devastating and far reaching consequences as is evidenced in the dissolution of true masculine brotherhood, which is vital for the preservation and endurance of families. 
• As men we must be vigilant and turn off all exterior and interior distractions, tuning out the noises around us so that we make room through silence to hear the voice of God"
• We as men also need to be more bold in our outward expression of our faith. We can not grow complacent in our mission of evangelization
• We as men always must comfort the afflicted, but ALSO AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE!
• We as men must never fear, never compromise our authentic masculine, spiritual identities
• We, as Christian men must also strive to be magnanimous which loosely defines means, striving for greatness, in all areas of our lives
• We as men must have a ferocious resolve to accomplish our goals and purposes
• "We as men must be careful in the language we use in describing our mission because when language disappears, then culture disappears and when culture disappears, civilization disappears  We as a nation are heading through this downward reality
• We as men need to WAKE UP! We must reclaim our collective desires as men to fight for the right causes