I want to thank everyone for all of the prayers and thoughts this weekend while the First Mate and I conducted a Marriage Encounter weekend.  We had a great group of couples, some of whom were trying to work through serious issues in their marriages.  One needed more time and will go to another program for marriages in crisis called Retrouvaille and hopefully counseling, but several more couples shared with us how much progress our program allowed them to make.  What we teach is a communications process and encourage couples to open themselves to each other, but we don’t participate in that process — so the couples just needed the right framework to make their own progress.

As always, we returned emotionally exhausted, and I’m just now trying to catch up to my e-mail and feedreader … which is always daunting after a weekend away.  I’ll toss this out as an open thread on the big stories of the weekend: what did I miss?  That’s got to be easier than wading through massive loads of junk mail on a Monday morning.

As a bonus, here’s a beautiful song that the First Mate and I discovered a few years ago and now use in every Marriage Encounter weekend.  It’s become “our song”, and it really captures how we feel about each other and marriage.  Clint Black and his wife Lisa Hartman Black sing “When I Said I Do”: