The North Carolina Retreat Is Open — And I Want You There
I want to tell you about a place.
Bryson City, North Carolina sits at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains — where the Blue Ridge folds into itself and the morning mist hangs low over the river and everything feels slower than the rest of your life. There are hiking trails that wind through old growth forest. There are porches made for sitting. There is the kind of quiet that doesn’t feel empty — it feels full.
That’s where we’re going.
April 8–11, 2027. Bryson Village, Bryson City, NC. Fourteen women tucked into the mountains for three days of Scripture, silence, honest conversation, and the kind of rest that doesn’t require you to perform anything.
Registration is open now!
This Retreat Is Different
I’ve been in women’s ministry (because, I’m a woman!) long enough to know what changes women and what doesn’t. What changes a woman is community — real community, with someone who already knows her whole story. The friend she calls at midnight. The sister who was there for the hard years.
So this retreat has a different format. You come with your person.
A sister. A best friend. Someone you trust with the real stuff. You share a room and you share the experience — and then you go home changed together. That part matters. The retreat doesn’t end when you leave Bryson City. It lives on in the relationship you brought with you.
There’s less performing when your person is already in the room. Women arrive differently when they don’t have to explain their whole backstory to a stranger. They go deeper faster. They laugh harder. They cry without worrying what someone they just met will think.
What We’ll Do
Three days. Four nights. Here’s the arc:
Thursday evening we arrive. We settle in, share a meal, and begin to slow down. There’s something about crossing the threshold into a retreat space that starts the work before anyone says a word.
Friday we open with Yahweh — the covenant name of God revealed in Exodus 34. We’ll spend the morning in that passage, in prayer, in the kind of unhurried conversation that doesn’t happen in a 45-minute Bible study. In the afternoon we hike.
There is something about moving your body through creation that does something to the soul that sitting in a room cannot. The Smoky Mountains have trails for every level — you don’t have to be a hiker to belong on this retreat. You just have to be willing to walk for a while and let God meet you in the trees.
Saturday is our deepest day. We move through Hesed — the Hebrew word for steadfast love — and then El Roi, the God who sees. We’ll spend time in Ephesians 1–3, in the identity that was always yours before you ever earned anything. Evening is campfire and communion.
Sunday morning we gather for breakfast, for a blessing, and we send each other home. There is no teaching Sunday morning — just the space to carry what you’ve received back into your real life.
Who This Is For
This retreat is for the woman who is hungry — for depth, for Word, for a few days of being known without having to explain herself.
She has been faithful. She has shown up for her people, her church, her family. She knows her Bible. She loves God. And somewhere in all of that faithful showing up, she has gotten a little lost — a little depleted, a little far from the version of herself who used to feel the presence of God like something she could reach out and touch.
She’s been strong for everyone else. This is for her.
And she’s bringing her person — the woman who has watched her be strong, who knows the real story, who is ready to go somewhere beautiful and slow down together.
The Details
Dates: April 8–11, 2027
Location: Bryson Village, Bryson City, North Carolina
Format: Sisters/close friends paired — you share a room and bed with your person
Capacity: 14 women (7 pairs)
Investment: $950 per person – includes lodging, all meals, teaching, and guided hike (excludes travel)
A Word About the Teaching
I go into hard places.
I don’t teach around the grief or the shame or the things that are difficult to say out loud in a church pew. I believe the Word is strong enough to hold everything we bring to it — the betrayal, the loss, the years of being the strong one, the quiet faith crisis nobody knew about.
The arc of this retreat — Yahweh, Hesed, El Roi — is an arc about being known. We start with who God is. We move into how He loves. We land in how He sees. By Sunday morning you will have spent three days being seen by the One whose seeing changes everything.
I’ve watched it happen around a table in Phoenix with eight women who flew in from across the country. I’ve watched women weep while being prayed over because someone finally said the thing they’d been carrying alone. I’ve watched the expression on a woman’s face change when she realizes she doesn’t have to explain herself here.
That’s what I’m building in North Carolina.
Come Anyway
You might be reading this and thinking: I don’t know if I can swing it. The money, the time away, the logistics of leaving for four days.
I hear that. And I want to gently say, the women who need this most are almost always the ones who talk themselves out of it first.
The woman who is holding everything together for everyone else. The one who hasn’t had four days to herself in years. The one who keeps saying next year, when things slow down, when it makes more sense.
Things don’t slow down. You have to choose to step out of the current.
Fourteen spots. The mountains of North Carolina. Your person beside you. April 2027.
Come anyway.
Questions? Email me at susan@flannelsandpearls.com — I’d love to talk through whether this is the right fit for you.
With you,
Susan
Flannels & Pearls
