Life before training camp:
This summer has been a little rough for me. Between the transition of graduating college and moving forward in my life there was an awkward three month long limbo period where I chose to live and work in Blacksburg. Life was all fine and dandy as a part-time waittres/part-time chicken farmer until I realized just how lonely Blacksburg is when (most) of your friends are gone and noone else lives in your house. Between the lack of opportunities and the exhaustion of working two (sometimes three, sometimes four) jobs, I did absolutely nothing but sit on my butt and eat. This laziness turned into apathy and my apathy turned into complacency. In this state of complacency I began to second guess my decision to go on the World Race and started coming up with (bogus) reasons to back out. However, with a little fire lit under my vastly expanding rear-end, I managed to drag myself to the training camp and it couldn’t have come a day too early.
Life during training camp:
I feel like training camp can be summed up in one long monosyllabic moan of exhaustion. I don’t even know if I can recall any of the details of that week because it was just a whirlwind of worship, teambuilding excercises, and new (sometimes gross) cultural food. Some people were wrecked and rebuilt, some were healed, some had their hearts broken, but I can’t say I had a similar experience. I think for me this week was about testing my ideas of what I thought to be true of God. Somewhere along the way I had confined God to a “this but not that” box. I had set up a list of guidelines of what I thought to be true of God and, before this week, was not at all open to the possibility of something different. But throughout this week, what I experienced did not line up with the “truths” I had established and this shook me up.
For example, and I type this very hesitantly because I’m still trying to process, we prophecied (seriously, I’m cringing as I type this). Before this week, I have had many very long drawn out arguments against prophecy, but this week it was redefined as “listening prayer” or better yet “declarations of truth”. It wasn’t “telling the future” as I have always thought but instead it was basically just listening to God and then praying truths we already know to be true, like “You will be redeemed in Christ”. Anyways, this is what happened: We were told to close our eyes, someone would come up to us, and we had to pray for them as we felt led. As I stood there praying for this unknown stranger (and feeling stupid because I was wearing a silly dress from a thrift store) I randomly started praying for leadership, I didn’t feel like God spoke to me or like He took over my words and I had no control, I was just praying things I knew to be true and it led to praying about leadership. After about a minute we were told to open our eyes and talk to the person, so I opened my eyes and the unfamiliar man I had just prayed for revealed to me that not three hours early he had been appointed the position of team leader. This wasn’t the only thing that happened throughout the week, and although I have always been a strong believer in coincidences, there were just too many to not make me question my foundational thoughts of God. And as many of you know, this is a particularly huge thing because I do not like to be wrong and humility is definitely not one of my strengths.
Life after training camp:
Training camp was so busy and hectic that I never really got a chance to process what was going on so I looked forward to coming home and resting and processing what happened. I had no such luck however because as soon as I got home I had to move to my parents house, then as soon as I got there I had to turn around and head back to Blacksburg for a wedding and before I knew it, it was a week later and the impact of training camp has faded into the background. So now I am toeing a fine line, stuck between getting too excited for the World Race and falling back into my apathetic complacency. So if you could, please pray for me during this awkward limbo time; pray for my mental/spiritual well-being and pray for continued support raising.
