Writing this blog feels really awkward for me. It has been nearly five months since I wrote a blog about the World Race. A lot has happened since then. However, perhaps the most impactful thing that I have experienced this entire year was training camp 2018. For those of you who don’t know, training camp is a 10 day discipleship journey in which Adventures in Missions attempts to prepare all the World Racers for the World Race. In this time, I met my squad, met my team, my leadership, encountered real life simulations of things I may experience on the field, listened to various speakers offer practical advice for life on the race, and much more. However, perhaps the most important thing that happened training camp was I experienced the Lord on a level I have never experienced before.
Growing up, I always knew God loved me. The bible told me so. My parents told me so. My pastor told me so. My teachers told me so. It seems like everywhere I went I was being told God loved me. I believed it too. But for a long time it was very hard for me to actually experience what his love for me felt like. I always felt the need to prove I love God so I could be loved by him. I would fill my life up with all the right things. Going to church, reading the bible, going to small group, doing kid’s ministry within the church, and even doing some missions trips. Every time I thought I reached a new level of spirituality, I would look around and see people doing much better than I was. I would compare myself a lot. Overall, I never allowed myself to be vulnerable because I wanted to be seen as someone who was higher in spirituality than some of the other people. I would cling to that for identity. Besides wanting to cover up my weakness, I also had this belief that no one else cared about what was going on within my heart. This cultivated isolation within me. My isolation drove me away from God. In a way, I felt trapped and enslaved, in a world all to myself in which my thoughts ruled over me and no matter how hard I would try, I was enslaved.
During the entire 10 days of training camp, God revived my heart and caused in me a resurgence of his love. From the beginning of training camp, God began to show me what it was like to live in Intimacy with him, walk in community with his Sons and Daughters, and live out the mission he calls each and every one of us to every day of our lives. Intimacy was always something I never really understood. Unfortunately, our culture has perverted and destroyed the meaning of this word and it was always equated in my mind with sex. However, I now realize that Intimacy is something that begins with God. It is a realization that God knows you. He knows your heart and everything about you. Yet he chooses to love you. Knowing how much he truly loves you and knows you causes you to want to know him and love him with the same intentionality and fervor that He loves you with. He doesn’t care about what you have done or will do, whether it is good or bad. He just wants to love you with all his mind, soul, and strength and wants you to do the same. Once I truly realized this, I was able to tear down some of the relational walls I had put up because I knew I was loved unconditionally.
Three days into training camp, we did something called a man hike, in which all the men in our squad (with the exception of one Jon Baker, I love you bro) went on a 5.5 mile hike to the top of a mountain on the Appalachian trail. God used this hike to grow my understanding of biblical community. The deep conversations I had, and the love I experienced from every guy there, were things that were simply lacking in my life. It was one of the first times I felt like people actually wanted to hear my story and I felt like it mattered. God used this to show me who he was. A God who really cares. With every story I heard, I realized how similar we all were and how even though I often feel alone because I feel I can’t relate, I relate to others much more than I think. Even as I write this, it feels weird to say and my mind tries to lie to me, but I can honestly say these guys love me and care about me and what I have to say and this love comes from a God with a never-ending well of living water. “Let anyone who is thirsty come and drink.” He wants to restore you and demonstrate his love to you. He wants to show you that you are enough. That you can be called his Children, a child of the one true King. Just call on him and seek him. You will never regret it.
