Hello!
Training is now over in Georgia. I am back home in Canada where I will be continuing to prepare for the World race for the next few months. I would like to share a few of the lessons learned and some of my frustrations during training.
My frustration is with the airline that I flew with from Detroit to Atlanta. They have succeeded in losing my luggage. I was without my stuff the whole time at training. Fortunately I was able to borrow some clothes and tooth paste and towels etc etc from the girls in my cabin, and AIM had an extra pillow and sleeping bag that I used all week. I have never been so excited to see a sleeping bag before! Also, half way through the week, my coach was able to take me to the store to buy a few clothes, and she also took home some of my clothes to wash for me. Linda (my coach) blessed me so much that day. So although the whole situation was frustrating, and I lost a day of training while trying to find my things at the airport, some good did come of it.
Some lessons learned from missing luggage-
1. I will NOT have a meltdown without “stuff”.
2. Having stuff can be a hindrance (I was always the first one ready, since I had nothing to gather)
3. I may not have a lot, but there are others who have less (for example, a girl on the September team who is leaving next week for Thailand, and also lost her luggage)
4. How to be truly thankful for what I have
5. I am not self-suffient, I had to rely on my team to lend me things.
My other frustration was with being stung twice by a wasp within 10 minutes from each other while we were having a few hours of silent time with God. Thankfully it didnt hurt for TOO long.
There were many more great things that came from training however. First I will tell you a bit about the structure and what it was like. The camp is at the central Adventures in Missions base in Gainesville, Georgia. Here I met AIM staff (who are all FABULOUS people, caring, generous, and very helpful), the September world racers, some new staff who were training, and of course my fellow January 2008 world race teammates. We were staying in cabins with no electricity, and no mattresses, just a little foam pad on plywood. 
For two nights we stayed in Unicoi state park and that was beautiful. It was here that one of my teammates was baptized in the lake, just before we left. For the duration of training, we had many seminars beginning on ones that helped us to grow individually with God, including a surrender walk, a time of grieving, and sessions about honesty and fulfilling our destiny. The second part of the week was focussed more on team building and listening prayer. This is where we learned about the gifts of God, and also had some intense physical team building tasks. One day we even had cultural training including going to Mexico town and talking with Hispanic people and trying to order food in Spanish at a Mexican restaurant.
This week I was also given a new perspective of servanthood. It is one that maybe I had known before, but I regained this perspective in a new way that was really brought home to me. I was thinking about different things I would want to do for my husband that I could do for Jesus if I were married to Him. My first thoughts were cook and clean (proving that my women’s studies degree did NOT in fact teach me anything ha ha). I was wondering how I would go about doing that, and all of a sudden I saw a long line of little African orphan children waiting to get some rice that I had cooked for them and thought about the fact that what I do for the least of these I do for Jesus. This was my new perspective on servanthood.
Another thing that I learned is about the gifts that God wants us to have. We were reminded that we have not because we ask not, and so we were given the opportunity to ask God for the gifts we wanted Him to give us. So my initial thought was ‘hey cool I could ask for healing and be able to heal all sorts of people’. So I prayed and asked God if thats what He wanted me to have. I felt that this was not the gift He wanted me to ask for. He told me that He wants me to not be in the front like that, He wants me in the back serving and praying. Well this was a stretch for me. I have been struggling with prayer lately, with everyone telling me a different set of “rules” for praying, including some who say there are no “rules”. For God to tell me He wants me to be one of the prayers was very difficult to hear, and I admit He and I had a “discussion” (ie argument) for a little bit until I finally submitted and said that I would do as He asks, as long as He teaches me how. So now I have bought a couple of books about prayer and am very excited to see what God has to teach me! Even the first day after I asked God to teach me about prayer He showed me some very basic lessons to be learned from the Lord’s prayer.
There was so much packed into this week and it taught all of my team and I many things about ourselves, each other and God. I am very excited (no longer scared) about next year and I thank you all for supporting me.
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