So I’m back after my week of training camp. You may think that it was just a bunch of teenagers setting up tents and getting to know each other over the course of a week, your not wrong, but you haven’t scratched the surface…
Training camp was probably the hardest week of my 19 year old life, I was challenged physically, mentally, and spiritually.
From the first day they put us into situations that we had never been in, whether it be a simulation of a market place where we had to communicate with vendors to get food or when the non-existent airline lost half of our bags on the fake flight forcing us to make do with half the luggage. Though my personal favorite fake situation was when we were at the imaginary border crossing and where forced to sleep 36 of us in a school bus over night.
One day they told all of the guys at training camp to board onto a bus and the Adventures in missions staff drove us to a house that some of the staff live at, which was located right next to a lake. They told all of us to grab a log and head to the lake, we were told to enter the water with the log and to keep it above the water and swim across the lake. My log was not one of the few that made it dry across the lake. It was a very exhausting swim.
The one night that God really showed himself to me was after our speaker (Ron Walborn) finished preaching. Our squad went outside and our leaders had an exercise set up to test the holy spirit. That was something I had never experience or even really tried to do but I went along with it.
They separated our squad in half and each side stood in a straight line across from each other. We all prayed and then our leaders told us the half of us would close our eyes and the other half would approach whoever the holy spirit would lead them too and then they would speak whatever the holy spirit would command them too. I closed my eyes and someone came to me and just spoke answers to my prayers that I had been praying about for a while.
I will be traveling to the Philippines, Swaziland and Nicaragua during my 9 month trip and cant wait to see what God has planned for me. Below is my team for the next 9 months.
left to right- Nathan, Courtney, Jamie, Maddy, Drew and me in the front
One week of training camp was the worst thing and best thing that has happened to me in my walk with Christ. God can do some amazing things especially when he catches you off-guard.
