10 days…. That was it just 10 short days changed my life like I never thought was possible.
10 days in the very warm sun
10 days with 50 other crazy Jesus loving people
10 days eating random things on our community plate
10 days of bucket showers and sleeping on the ground
10 days of crazy intense lessons
10 days of love and tears
10 days of hugs and physically carrying each other around
10 days to become the best version of ourselves
10 days of fun and joy as a new family
10 days felt like a long time in the mist of it all but really it was just a bitter sweet taste of the new life we will be living as we begin our journey as world racers.
All 10 of those things ring true of what training camped looked like. As I was leaving camp on Saturday I was so ready to be back home to tell everyone about everything we had experienced and never in a million years would it have crossed my mind that I would miss training camp… well okay I don’t necessarily miss all the parts of camp but mostly the community we built. I watched 50 basically complete strangers (besides talking through social media) become a family within hours. I cried in front of complete strangers I let my guard down and felt safe with these people, I honestly loved these people as if we were a real family.
The first half of camp the lessons and activities were focused on us and who we were in Christ and the junk we brought into camp with us. They went deep and forced us to reevaluate our lives, why we were there, and who we believed that we were in Christ. God revealed to me some people in my past that I never had forgiven and through a few very emotional days we walked through that and I was able to forgive and truly look at them and believe that they too were a child of God, and because God does not hold us to our mistakes and our past that I should have been holding these people in my life to their past. Adventures in missions truly believe that “FREE PEOPLE, FREE PEOPLE” meaning they wanted to insure that we walked freely with the Lord with nothing holding us back so we could go correctly share the love of God. We learned how to trust ourselves and others. We had to talk about the hard things and I honestly was scared and worried about what other people on my team would thing about me if they knew who I really was and my past and my struggles. The breaking point for me was during the man hike (all the men went on a crazy long hike and it was just us girls at camp) we did an activity call “stand for my sister” we had to be completely honest and answer hard questions on a piece of paper. We then all turned them in and they were passed back out through the group of girls, each girl unaware of whose paper they had just gotten would stand for the person that paper represented. So if the person’s paper you had, had answered yes to one of the questions you would stand for her. After the girls would stand everyone would look around and we started to notice there was never just one girl standing, no one was ever alone. All the shame and guilt we had brought to camp all the fear that no one would understand because no one else has ever been through that was shattered. The coolest part of that activity for me was no one had to stand for themselves they had someone else standing in their shame and sin for them, and it hit me that, that is what the father does for us.
Jesus stands for us.
In our sin and shame Jesus takes our place
We are never alone because Jesus stands for us and makes us new and free.
Camp allowed me to be a part of an environment that I had never been a part of. I worshiped in a tiny room with 300+ people who were free and who believed that they were free and it was wild, mind blowing worship. We stayed up all night one night singing, praying, banging on tables making music, and even dancing as we worshiped our God. (Yes even dancing lots and lots of dancing) I am grateful for camp because it gave me a taste of what my life is going to be like, but also taught me how to stop boxing God in and it was beautiful when I finally allowed God to shatter that box and all the thoughts and strings I had attached to him. My team and I are not the same people we were when we stepped foot onto that camp ground. I am made new in Christ and I’m never going back!
I am so excited to be able to go through this experience with these 50 other people who were perfectly placed together on one crazy weird squad.
Next stop Lezhe, Albania
