Walking into training camp, with my 65 letter pack on my back, and my book bag on my front I thought, “what did I get myself into”.
Meeting the 42 strangers I would be living with for 9 months, engaging in small talk thinking,
“what can I talk about with these people”
“what face am I going to have put on to please these people?”
“can I be myself? or is that too much?”
Hiding the deepest parts of myself, because it was “too much” or “too bad” for the christian people I was surrounded with.
After the first few session we had been broken up into small groups after each talk, so we can get down into the nitty gritty parts of ourselves, an become comfortable sharing our testimonies with strangers and breaking down walls and discovering past issues we had no clue still bothered us and affected us in such big ways still to this day.
One talk that really hit home for me was about forgiveness. You may think it’s simple. God says forgive people as he has forgiven us. But when you push away and put aside the hurt and refuse to forgive someone, the emotions build up and keep stacking onto of each other, until you just explode. And all the built up emotions tend to create this fake self. We slowly change ourselves to something we are not to become more accepted or to prevent further hurt than we have experienced. Which is very accurate to my life, I tend to just keep everything to myself an not let things go, and all this bottled up anger and hurt has just kept building up throughout my life. A quote from the session I wrote down in my journal was,
“Forgiveness is not condoning or excusing what happened or what was done to you. Do not give the person power over you, forgive them, and give all the power and glory to God. When we forgive we set ourselves FREE“.
After hearing these messages, and talking with these people, and hearing God talk to me, the one thing that kept sticking out to me was,
“you are worthy, and you are loved”.
God has heavily assured me and put it on my heart this week. And through hearing this I was able to set aside my past, fully forgive those who have hurt me, forgive God for putting me through such pain and dissatisfaction and most importantly forgive myself. It’s such a freeing feeling to surrender your past forgive and give all the glory and praise to our creator.
Training camp broke down so many walls and fake selfs we had created, but also brought together 42 brothers and sisters. I found my people.
After a night of sharing testimony’s and worshipping around a campfire one night we all slowly realized we had been feeling almost the same way. We all have dirt in our pasts, but we love to be goofy and have dance parties and rap battles.
As a family, we shared so many memories I can’t even begin to explain them all.
Happy birthday, Clay! (after your 30th birthday everyday is your birthday to H squad)
And to all my Wisconsin friends… it’s not pronounced ham-MOCK… it’s just not.
It’s so crazy to me that after just 10 short days, strangers became my family, and just being away from them for 3 days as of now I don’t possibly know how i’ve managed 17 (almost 18) years of my life without these amazing and Godly people by my side.
This blog has no tittle because I have absolutely no idea how to title this. Training camp left me speechless. In a good way. I am absolutely in love with H squad, in love with the AIM staff, and in love with God.
With training camp being over, I now have 6 weeks, 6 WHOLE WEEKS until H squad launches to Costa Rica!! I still have about $3,000 more to raise in my world race account before I am fully funded, and about $2,000 of personal money to come up with for additional spending and adventures.
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xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoox,
Katy Nolasco
