By: Marie Rice
On October 5, a cold, dreary Saturday, the Riverbend TEC family gathered at St. Aloysius in Olivia, MN for a day of faith, hope, love, growth, and prayer.
Joining our Riverbend TEC family for the day was: Billy O’Regan, the TEC Conference Executive Director, who traveled from New Orleans, LA, and Deacon Kevin Fuller, the TEC Conference Assistant Director, who traveled from Omaha, NE.
In the morning, we prayed and engaged in table discussion, a format anyone who has made a weekend will recognize! We reflected on the TEC weekend and what makes it such an amazing experience, including friends, family, unconditional love, the opportunity to share God’s love with others, and an encounter with Christ. We shared how the experience of dying, rising, and going fourth has helped us all growth in faith.
As we prayed together, and each person shared what TEC meant to us, we began to detect a thread emerging from our prayers and discussion. We discovered what most TEC family members know instinctively but may not have ever said out loud before: what makes a TEC center successful is people’s ability to connect with other TEC family members. That happens at each Reunion. But… if a TEC center has not had a weekend for a while, people miss their friends and fellow TEC family members.
What keeps a TEC center active, alive, engaged and going is an active Fourth Day.
After lunch, we moved into a more formalized presentation by Billy and Kevin breaking down the format of a TEC weekend event by event. WHAT should we doing? WHO should do it? WHERE should this piece of the weekend take place—the church or the conference room? WHY do we do what we do? HOW do all these pieces fit together to give the TECite the experience we all hope they have?
Even those who have multiple weekends worth of service to TEC hopefully found at least a nugget or two of wisdom, especially under the guidance of Billy and Kevin, with their robust theological and Catholic youth service backgrounds.
As we love to do on a TEC weekend, we completed the day by attending mass at St. Aloysius. First, we got fed by Christ in the Eucharist. And then we were fed in another, literal way as we sat down to eat supper at Max’s Grill before heading home, pleasantly tired and richly rewarded.
