I returned on Friday night from about 10 days of training in Georgia for this mission trip. It was a great trip all over the board.
I met most of my teammates who will be going on the trip with me. That in itself was awesome! Amazing people that I cannot wait to travel and minister alongside. Great and genuine relationships have already begun.
The training consisted of a lot of seminars and speakers. Some were better than others, but I learned a lot from them. All of us World Racers tent camped in AIM’s presidents front yard. We had optional prayer every morning @ 5:30 (that I went to a majority of the days), a leadership meeting at 6:30 (i went most days) and then some days we had optional running with seth barnes. (the pres of AIM) I did that twice.
In addition to the seminars and lectures we had, we also did some physical team building activities, a lot of debriefing/support times with our team where we talked about what we were learning from whatever we did that day, what God was doing in us and praying for each other for whatever we needed.
Some of what I think the main themes were for the training were:
- Being comfortable with being uncomfortable – We are going to be in places and living in places that are going to be less than desirable. places that are really going to stretch our comfort levels, and we have to learn how to get along without simple comforts and luxuries that we enjoy now. And get comfortable or at least adaptable to the different ways of life in different cultures.
- We can’t do this on our own – By ourselves we will not be able to make it through this trip. We must depend on God everyday to give us strength to get through things. “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” (ref coming soon)
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“Lord, break our hearts for the things that break your heart.” – We are going to experience things that are going to make us cry. Things that will make us wonder how God can let it happen. Things that
will break our hearts. But it is only when we have that sense of brokenness that we will develop a greater passion and love for those people. A passion and love that really and truly wants to help them and tell them about the great news of Jesus!! - Getting rid of emotional baggage – We all have it. We all have things that we struggle with and things that consume us when we don’t want them to. Self-esteem, confidence levels, money, lust, depression, something we can’t forgive ourselves for. . .there’s an infinite amount of things that people can struggle with. To help us get rid of it at training, there was tons of prayer going on. Leaders and staff would pray for us whenever we needed it. There were people we could meet with for counseling too. We went over personality evaluations that we had previously taken. But most of all, just lots of prayer. LOTS OF PRAYER!
For me, one event that definitely stood out was the ‘No Hope Tent.’ The staff put together this big army tent that they filled with various extreme cases and types of people that we will likely encounter on the field and who we will be ministering to. They were all just acting, but they did an amazing job of making it real. There was: an abusive father, drug addict, someone smoking marijuana, a homeless woman, a girl struggling with cutting herself, a stripper/pole dancer, a severly depressed girl, two guys violently fighting…etc. Bascially people that are going to be the most difficult and scariest to minister to. People that feel light years away from God’s love, if they know it at all. People that are possibly going to just bluntly reject you outright when you try to help them or share God’s love and Jesus with them. We got to go through the tent twice. Keep in mind that we had no idea what we were walking into. I talked to the girl who was struggling hardcore with depression and worthlessness. After the second time through, I came out of the tent rather angry, but also the most fired up and alive that i have felt in years. I felt like i didn’t do any good by talking to her and comforting her. I was too hesistent and confused about what to say, and i was just angry that i didn’t do more. But the whole exercise broke me. I knew exactly what it felt like to be in her shoes and it forced me to tears to know that people like her are out there who may not know that God loves them and that Jesus died for them. I felt helpless but alive! My teammates that were there with me and that had gone through the tent with me , had my back yo! They too were hugely affected by what they saw in there and experienced, but they huddled around me and prayed for me and even cried with me.
I could seriously go on for hours about things that happened and things I learned down there during training. God taught me a lot and cleared up some things for me. If you want to know more about that stuff, just ask me. I mean i didn’t even touch on the day that we were forced to be ‘refugees’ for a whole 16 hour, supposed to be 24 hour day.
And i would’ve put pictures on here too, but i only have a film camera at the moment and i left the film in georgia to see if my fellow media team peeps could use the pictures for anything.
in the next week i will post some journal exerpts and quotes from the training as well.
peace, ryan
