Recordings From the CFOI Retreat 1986

Gloster Udy works through seven people the Gospels record Jesus praising, from a healed leper’s gratitude to a widow’s two coins. Jesus commended whoever gave “all his will” or “all her heart,” he tells the 1986 CFOI Retreat in Australia. He asks campers what they are still withholding.

Gloster Udy leads campers through a live writing exercise on anger and resentment. He then turns to Psalm 73 to trace how a mind fixed on others curdles into judgment and self-pity. As he puts it, “first impressions are not always right,” and attention turns back to God. The talk comes from the 1986 CFOI Retreat in Australia.

Gloster Udy unpacks Paul’s claim in Philippians 4 to have learned the secret of facing every situation, likening Christ’s strength to tea infused into water. He closes by recalling a widow who scratched “this is the day the Lord has made” into her window, as he sends campers home from the 1986 CFOI Retreat in Australia.

Gloster Udy reworks the Beatitudes as pairs that give birth to Christian character, in a session at the 1986 CFOI Retreat in Australia. He traces how Frank Laubach let go of losing a Philippine seminary election by one vote. Still longing to serve, Laubach became a literacy missionary to the Moro people.

Opening the 1986 CFOI Retreat in Australia, Gloster Udy traces how Glenn Clark’s prayer seminars for restless convention crowds grew into camps farthest out. He then recalls how Roland Brown once prayed for him at a Sydney tollgate. The prayer so startled him that he drove straight through without paying the toll.

Gloster Udy names five keys that he believes the disciple Peter watched Jesus use: prayer, faith, surrender, forgiveness and healing. He illustrates faith with a trust fall, in which a young camper named Jim leans backward off a table, trusting Udy to catch him. The talk was given at the 1986 CFOI Retreat in Australia.