I have to begin by thanking all of you. Because of your continued love and support I am now fully funded for my World Race mission trip coming up this August! I am beyond amazed and blessed by all of your generosity, love, and support. I am so grateful for the way you have allowed yourselves to be used by God to bless and teach me about God’s constant love and infinite provision. The Lord has showed me through all of you his promise in Matthew 21:22, “And whatever you ask for in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” Each of you has been an answered prayer to me and I will never be able to thank you enough for your love and generosity towards me! Thank you so much for partnering with me in this upcoming season of my life and I cannot wait to share the experiences and stories from the mission field with you all!
As many of you know I have just come home from Training Camp for the World Race. Training camp was such an awesome, exciting, and exhausting experience. It was awesome to get to meet the other 50 people on my squad and get to know all of them as we came together to press into what the Lord has prepared for us for the upcoming year. During Training Camp we as a squad dove into our identity as children of God in Christ, recovered from past wounds, learned a little more about what life looks like on the race, and were trained in how to share the gospel and love of Christ with people around the world.
One of the biggest and best lessons and take-aways that I got from training camp was the identity we have in Christ. It was not necessarily a new sermon or concept, in fact it was something I had heard many times before, but it became much more real to me during Training Camp. We were talking about our identity and about how now that we are redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice we are viewed as perfect to God. We once were sinners and unworthy, but through Christ’s sacrifice we are redeemed children. Because of that, we have a calling as God’s children to be the salt of the earth, when people meet us and see how we live and the hope that we have, they should be thirsty for more and be thirsty to know God. We are the light of the world, when the world looks at us and interacts with us they will know we are different because of the love we display and the hope we have. We are enemies of the devil, as John 10:5 says, “But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice”, it is now against our nature and identity in Christ to follow the devil or anyone else. While listening to this sermon and talking about it with others I subconsciously knew all this was true, but then some of our trainers and squad leaders came and prayed over me and as they were praying I realized that this is not a passive or one time lesson. I realized that from the things they were praying over me that this is how our Heavenly Father talks about us to other people. If you belong to Christ, and someone was to ask God what He thinks about you, He would actively tell them howHe loves you, how proud He is of you, how He treasures you, how happy He is to call you His child, and how He desperately longs to be with you all the time. When I heard these prayers and was able to process that this is how God presently and constantly thinks about me it changed the way I viewed myself in the world. I am completely fulfilled in Christ and there is nothing more I need to do to earn his love and nothing more He is asking of me than to seek, love, and enjoy Him daily. I had always subconsciously known this but God turned it from something I just knew to something that is always happening and always true. I encourage all of you to really think about who Christ has made you through what He did for you on the cross and go out into the world with that continually on your mind and the world around you will be different because you’re not the same, you have been changed.
In addition to the teachings, there were several “mission field scenarios” that we underwent such as having to share gear because the airline lost our luggage, sleeping in an airport during an 8 hour layover, and cramming 10 people into a 6 person tent with all our bags when our hostel is smaller than expected. Though these scenarios cost us a lot of sleep, we were able to really bond and become closer as a team as we realized how close we would be constantly while on the race and how blessed we are in America.
One of my favorite things that happened during Training Camp was the “Man Hike.” The men at training camp were all able to go out and go on a 13 mile hike with all our gear on the Appalachian Trail, though the guys from our squad ended up hiking for 16 miles after 3 mile detour to find water. During this hike we got to see the beauty in God’s creation as well as learn what it looked like to live out a life as a man of God and the example we needed to set in our squad and teams.
The last few days of training camp were heavily focused on team building and putting us into teams of about 6 or 7 people. After a lot of exercises and prayer it was announced that my team would be Brandon Moorer, Tyler Ward, Hannah Ault, Tanna Becker, Mallory Morrison, and myself. This team will be my family for the first few months of the race and I am so excited to serve and glorify God with them! They are all terrific and you can get to know them by checking out their blogs under the “Meet My Squad” tab.
Lastly, my route for the World Race has been updated. My squad will no longer be going to Burkina Faso because of a terrorist attack that killed our ministry contact there. Please pray for Burkina Faso, the Adventures in Mission’s ministry contact, and the family! Instead of Burkina Faso, our squad will be starting our ministry in The Ivory Coast in August and later in the route half of us will be going to Burma and half will be going to Laos.
Thank you all again so much for the way you have blessed me through partnering with me! Please continue to pray for me, my team, and my squad as we prepare for our mission trip this August. Please also pray for the countries and the people we are going to visit so that the Lord may go before us and prepare their heart to be open to Him! God bless you all!
GLORY TO GOD!
