Onward into Refuge at this Year’s YOB Retreat

We’re home from our seventh YOB retreat dating back to 2018, and for my money, it was our best retreat yet. Maybe that’s a cliche thing to say after practically every YOB retreat, and maybe there’s also some recency bias at play, but I’m also only one of two guys left who has attended all seven of our events. I feel qualified to assert this claim, though it’s also a nebulous thing to “rate” each of our weekends – all seven of which have been incredible times of brotherhood and spiritual togetherness.

Our leadership and a batch of rising leaders deserve a lot of credit for this retreat. We’ve organized seven retreats now, each one more participatory than the last – this one more than any other. By my count, we had at least 20 guys standing up front, literally or metaphorically, contributing beyond the minimum. The combination of my own growth as a leader with the contributions from these many men made this retreat particularly lovely (and, yes, my personal favorite).

This year we had 53 attendees from all over America, Canada, and the UK, making this both our most internationally diverse and also largest retreat ever. That was fun.

Numbers are fun. They can serve as helpful signposts along the winding course of our community’s journey. But numbers only tell the surface of the story.

Beneath these 53 attendees, beneath 53 generous giving amounts, beneath 53 Discord usernames, beneath 53 Zoom squares, there are these 53 humans made in God’s image. 53 other brothers with 53 stories and 53 opportunities for new connection, new growth, and new direction.

Our retreat theme this year was ONWARD, a nod to our organization’s new course as a nonprofit ministry of Your Other Family. Our retreat’s theme verse was Genesis 12:1, a personal favorite:

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

For years, I’ve found this verse to be so magical, so epic; after all, it’s not my life on the line. If it were, how very daunting and arresting this must have been beyond the epic and magical.

I’m inspired that Abram couldn’t say where exactly God was leading him — no address, no GPS, no books or binders or intel on what awaited him there (spoiler: a bunch of Canaanites already inhabiting the land) — in a culture, no less, that never saw you leave your homeland. And yet he heard God’s one-word instruction:

Go.

And so he went.

Our journey from Your Other Brothers, Inc. to Your Other Brothers c/o Your Other Family, Inc. doesn’t feel as perilous as Abram’s new course, but it remains one of great unknowns. All the forms, all the legal fees, all the board meetings, all the new fundraising efforts that may or may not come to fruition.

It’s been a lot, these last couple years. We recently had our ministry’s 501(c)(3) status approved by the IRS, and now that our formational dust has (mostly) settled, some lingering questions hang in the air:

Where are we going as a community? A men’s community, also a women’s community, and a co-ed community?

When will we get there? How will we get there? Where even is “there”?

What joys — and what giants — await us?

I have a lot of big dreams for what YOB and YOS and YOF could look like in the years (decades??) to come, and also a lot of “big practicality,” since, well, logistics are a thing. Financial limitations aside, I invited our retreat attendees to dream big with me this year, writing suggestions for “future memories” for our community. Among the standout suggestions I read aloud on our final morning were a 10th YOB retreat occurring on a cruise (an idea perhaps planted by yours truly) as well as a “YOF retirement home.” That second one got a big laugh — and also some big cheers.

I love “dream big” ideas that ignore the financial or other logistical limitations, because even if they’re not remotely practical (and I’m not necessarily saying either of those ideas aren’t), they point to the true desires and needs of our community.

There’s one innate desire to celebrate our wins and milestones whenever we approach such bends in the road. We will certainly do something celebratory for our 10th YOB retreat in a few years! On a boat or otherwise.

And there’s another innate desire at play here: to find and foster togetherness and security, both for today and particularly for tomorrow. Like storing up love for future seasons of drought and famine. Of old age and disease.

Sadly, I am not the same wide-eyed millennial who cofounded YOB a decade ago as a naive 28-year-old. I’ve been bruised. I’ve been weathered. My thirties have rocked me and humbled me in some brutal ways.

My thirties have also deepened my faith, both in God and in the strength of this community who places our ultimate hope in Him. As my forties come knocking, I see less and less silliness in the notion of a YOF retirement home; more and more truth emerging from this community and even my own life as we all age, together.

More than some fanciful desire, this need for longterm love and longterm refuge is vital if indeed I remain unmarried and childless into my forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond.

Our YOB retreats are always wonderful present-day reminders, and perhaps even pointers, toward such future refuge. A chance to immerse ourselves in brotherly love each year: face to face, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, eye to eye, soul to soul.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing retreat stories from several of our attendees. I can’t wait for you to hear them. As 53 people entered our weekend together, 53 stories have since emerged. It wasn’t a perfect weekend. It certainly wasn’t a perfect bathroom situation.

But this retreat was ours. This blessed weekend, for the seventh time, God bless it, was ours.

Stay tuned, friends, for I have much more to share about this retreat.

But first, let’s hear more from my other brothers. I can’t wait to see where our ONWARD goes from here…