Now that you’ve met some of the people I’ll be traveling the world with, I want to tell you about how God worked in my life over the course of just 10 days. Or maybe you haven’t met them, now you can —–> RIGHT HERE!
Training camp was more than port-a-pottys, bucket showers, bug bites, and tenting. While I assure you it was all of those things, it was also so much more. Imagine the hardest week of your life and the best week of your life collide head on… THAT IS TRAINING CAMP!
I’m going to try to compress (as much as I can) what the Lord taught me in 10 days time into one blog. Buckle up! I’m sorry this is so LONG…
A follower of Jesus vs. a fan of Jesus
Ever called yourself a Christian yet didn’t live it out very well? Yeah, sadly me too! Honesty at it’s finest..for me, I have always struggled by measuring my faith by the sin I don’t commit. I allow the enemy to use the tool of comparison to rob me of growing in my relationship with the Father.
It’s easy to fall into what society considers a Christian instead of truly becoming a follower of Christ and pursuing a relationship with the Lord.
My very first night of training camp, the Lord caught my attention in Matthew 4:18-20. I felt God speaking to the very core of who I was. In these verses Jesus wasn’t asking Peter and Andrew to leave behind hobbies, he was asking them to abandon their lives, jobs, families, comforts to follow him.
I had to be real and ask myself.. Do I just believe in Jesus or am I a follower? What would my life look like if I truly abandoned my life in order to follow Christ, no matter what it took?
Forgiveness
As much as I tried to avoid it, God broke me over this, time and time again.
I can’t even tell you how many times during sessions I sat down, talked to the Lord, and bawled my eyes out over people and situations I’ve pushed down for so long, yet never took the action of forgiveness. These are the hurts that came to the surface. These are the things that hit me hard. These are things I never knew had this much power over me. Sadly, some of these things have been pushed down since I was a child…
Going into the race, my relationships with my family have weighed very heavy on me. There are conversations I should probably have with a parent, a friend, a family member that I’ve turned away from because it’ll be uncomfortable and hard. Leaving training camp, I now know there is an action that I need to take, that action is forgiveness.
A few things I wrote down during TC:
I’ve been forgiven of everything and Jesus commands that we forgive those who’ve wronged us.
As long as I walk in unforgiveness those things will have power over me.
Forgiveness allows freedom and others to see the love of the Father.
BRB while I ask the Lord for strength to forgive the people who have hurt me…
God is good even when I don’t understand
This one is a little painful to write about but a very big part of training camp for me. I’m going to leave out some details for the sake of length but since this was such an incredible learning experience for me, I may write a separate blog about it later.
As you read in my last post (or you didn’t but should), we met our squad and received our team assignments. I’m extremely happy and excited NOW but I wasn’t always. Not because I didn’t like the people on my team but I didn’t understand why I was placed on that team.
My last team evaluation, I was in a group of all introverts, and I am severely extrovert. It was a bit startling. I was anxious. All I could think was how in the world am I going to be able to handle this all year. I was scared I was going to have to tuck away my extrovert side to fit in and not be the only different one. I didn’t see what I brought to the table.
My heart raced, my emotions rose, and it was well known all over my face.
The time finally came to figure out the team you’d live in close community with for the next several months. A time meant to be exciting but it honestly was far from that for me. All around the room you could hear shrieks and cries of excitement but all I felt were warm tears falling down my face. I was embarrassed by my reaction and felt ashamed for being unhappy. The entire time I was worried my new teammates would think I hated them. I didn’t, I really didn’t. I just didn’t understand why I was put on this team.
The people I grew the closest with were all on different teams. My insecurity of being forgotten and left out kind of got the best of me. So, I felt left out, misunderstood, and unhappy.
I had poured out pieces of my heart to leadership, and felt like I wasn’t heard. I felt like they just put me on that team without any regard to who I was or who I connected with. I was upset, clearly. My natural reaction was to shut down, which is what I did initially, but I knew I needed to talk to someone. In the midst of my tears, Sydney completely caught me off guard as she spoke truth over me, some I wanted to hear and other parts I needed to hear. Then, Ben listened as I externally processed the mess that was jumbled inside of my head. Again, he spoke truth then turned me to the Lord.
I took it to the Lord, more than once but at first still wasn’t understanding. This left me even more upset. I finally accepted that I might not ever understand, and that’s when I felt the Lord telling me “I’m more concerned with your holiness than your happiness.”
That was sobering. I’m grateful for a Father that cares more about my holiness than my happiness. I’m thankful for a leadership team that is more concerned with my holiness than my happiness.
At times during training camp I wasn’t particularly thankful for the above things but looking back I can see God’s hand at work even in what felt like the darkest moments.
