One of the most exciting parts of Training Camp is finding out who exactly you will be serving with for the first few months on the field. Adventures in Missions (AIM) staff spends a lot of time observing us as they have us work through teamwork exercises with each other. Through this observation process, they are prayerful as they begin to form our teams and gather feedback from each of us on how working with particular people is going. They are intentional to put us in groups that will challenge and grow us. That may mean you are with someone you have quickly become friends with or someone you haven’t gotten to know well or don’t have much in common with. Either way, you really can’t go wrong, because as you sit in a room with your whole squad looking around at all of the different individuals, it is so clear that each of them are there for a reason and that God has also called them to go on the World Race with you.
This process was a bit nerve racking. One moment you are looking around at a potential team thinking “this will work”, then the next you are in a whole new group trying to figure out what does this team dynamic look like. It doesn’t make sense, but in the end it all seems to come together perfectly. For me, at the end I was sat down with five girls and we were all asked how we felt about this team. It became very clear to us that our group “made sense” and we quickly felt at peace about the idea of living and traveling together.
After all deciding that we really liked our team, AIM asked how my teammates and I felt about me being the Team Leader. Now stick with me as I go on a little tangent.
Entering into training camp, I was pretty set on not being a team leader. As a lot of you know, I have had some wonderful leadership opportunities in the past at school through Student Body President, so coming into the race I really thought this would be a season for me to learn to follow, a time for me to support another leader. I came in with thoughts like “do not feel down if you don’t get Team Leader”, “following will be good for you”, “this is how God will challenge you”. I continued to tell myself these things up until about few days before teams were chosen.
Leading up to being asked to be team leader, it hit me that I was telling myself it was time to follow, because I was questioning whether I really was a leader. I had been elected into my positions of leadership through not having an opponent or being the incumbent, and so I at times wondered if I ever really was a leader or if I just got lucky in getting leadership positions. I had begun to doubt myself.
It was the day before we were placed into our teams that I was approached by three people who felt that God was telling them they needed to speak into my life and you wouldn’t believe what each of them said! All three of them (two were people I had literally never seen before), told me that I was a leader and that leading is a position in which God has called me to and that I was more certain in who I was then I was telling myself.
It’s crazy how God works, because these comments took me from feeling incompetent and unconfident to feeling that leading could actually be a calling for me. Now that doesn’t mean I won’t still have a season where I follow, but this made it clear to me that I may be trying to pick out what I want God to challenge me in and not allowing him to choose.
Ok, so back to the main story. I was asked to lead, and it hit me right then and there that this is where God plans to challenge and grow me for the first few months. I could not be more excited to serve my team in this capacity! I would love introduce you to my team!
This here is a picture of Team Liora, which means “God’s gift of light to us”.
From left to right: Alexa Anover, Jen Tillett, Hannah Lin, Debbie Jacobs, Myself, and Sam DeCarlo
Rather than take the time to give you a glimpse of who each of them are, I’d like to point you to some of their wonderful blogs where they already have written a little bio about each of us. Here are three of those blogs:
http://jennifertillett.theworldrace.org/?filename=these-are-my-peopleteam-liora1
http://alexaanover.theworldrace.org/?filename=team-liora
http://debbiejacobs.theworldrace.org/?filename=meet-team-liora
I hope you had fun getting to know a little more about my team. It’s hard to believe we will all be together again at Launch in just 38 days!
