An Invitation to a Family Encounter Weekend
July 20-22, 2018
The Family Encounter is a live-in weekend where your entire family can experience true intimacies and discover the many wonderful things that you may not be aware of because of the hectic phase and pressures we go about on our daily lives. It is also a natural progression of the fruits that you and your spouse experienced during your Marriage Encounter Weekend, but this time, those fruits – the love, the joy and the peace will be shared among your children. The Family Encounter Weekend (FEW) will also be a cornerstone that can build a strong foundation to build your domestic church.
Families of the previous Family Encounters have found the FEW to be a very rewarding and spiritually invigorating experience. You and your family will be given many opportunities to reflect, discover and make deep your interpersonal bonding with one another, and along the way, will achieve a much closer relationship with God and experience His love in a very intimate way. The most important element that your family should bring to the FEW is an open heart and mind – because the good Lord will take care of the rest.
Families of the previous Family Encounters have found the FEW to be a very rewarding and spiritually invigorating experience. You and your family will be given many opportunities to reflect, discover and make deep your interpersonal bonding with one another, and along the way, will achieve a much closer relationship with God and experience His love in a very intimate way. The most important element that your family should bring to the FEW is an open heart and mind – because the good Lord will take care of the rest.
A PERSONAL SHARING FROM FE GRADUATES
The Family Encounter weekend was a blessing to our family. It greatly helped Lou, Cheryl and me in improving our relationship with each other. We were there with other families who all had the same hopes in their hearts: To better understand one another, to forgive and be forgiven, and be able to resolve family conflicts and misunderstandings. That it was held in a congenial and neutral venue (not in the house where parents rule and not in the dorm where the child reigns or any public place for that matter) made it more conducive to an open and loving (yes, loving) discussion of issues. I felt right away that the Holy Spirit was there guiding us because right from the start, all three of us expressed our desire to know the roots of our frequent conflicts and how to resolve them. We listened carefully when a family member articulated issues and problems. This retreat drew us closer to each other and deepened our faith as it made it easy for me to forgive and ask to be forgiven. What a heavy load off my heart! Toward the end, we all agreed to be more understanding, more trusting and let love abound in our household.I thank the Lord for having chosen us to be a part of the FE weekend. FE was one of the best gifts, if not the best, we gave one another. No other activity could compare with what we experienced during that weekend and the resulting dramatic changes for the better in our relationship. During the retreat, we were like sponges, soaking up the graces and blessings of the Lord and allowing Him to work in us. What we learned there remained with us and we continue to be more considerate toward each other. I hope that many families will have this same rewarding experience that we had .
By Lou and Gayle Alejandro
At first I was so skeptical to take FE. I'm an only child, so I thought a whole weekend with just my parents would be so awkward and cheesy, not to mention boring! Since I don't have siblings that could relate with me, I knew that a bulk of the weekend would be spent confronting issues, particularly with my mom, and I was really hesitant to bring those issues to the table. But when we got to FE it was like something inside just told me, this is the time to open up. God really does work in mysterious ways because if it wasn't for the retreat, my parents and I wouldn't have been able to bring to light so many of the things we resolved. It was such a huge relief to forgive and to be forgiven. I can't stress the importance of learning to forgive each other enough. Because of Family Encounter, my parents have become a lot more understanding and trusting of me, and I've learned to appreciate them so much now. This retreat isn't just one of those where you feel enlightened for a few days and then afterwards everything returns back to normal; you can still really see how much FE improved our relationship and it only continues to do so. I'm so amazed with how our fights have drastically decreased, which sometimes used to be every day to now practically none. I honestly think that FE was one of the best things we ever did together, and I really hope that other families experience as wonderful a retreat as we did.
By Cheryl Alejandro
By Cheryl Alejandro