After being at home for almost a month, processing everything learned at training camp, and being poked with way more needles than I wanted; I figured it was time to write a blog about it. I’m not good with words, so bear with me.
I could probably write for pages and pages about training camp when it came to all of the absurd things that we had to do. We stayed in the boons of Gainesville, GA, and had a new surprise everyday when it came to the food we ate and all the activities planned. Each day was a different themed culture which made the way we ate and acted that day pretty unusual. Schedules don’t exist in the land of Adventures in Missions. Honestly, by the end of the week the word “surprise” made my stomach hurt. Some days we sat through sessions upon sessions learning about God or ourselves, and somedays we went through a bunch of team building activities. Every afternoon we were instructed to take all our things (if the staff hadn’t taken them) and take it to a new location to sleep. Some nights we all got our own tents (that was on the good nights), sometimes we had to share tents, one time we got dropped off in the woods with no tents, and one night we slept on a bus. With little to no sleep, little food, and limited showers you could say that training camp made our squad grow pretty close pretty quick.
Being the introvert I am, the first couple days of training we pretty rough for me, then I realized that everybody there was nervous about meeting everybody. Some people were just better at hiding it. My training camp experience, although it was hard, brought me so much peace about this journey that I am about to go on. I was so anxious about the Race before training, but once I realized that I am not in this alone and that this is real and possible I got a whole new perspective on it.
The past couple of weeks, I have had to watch all my friends go off to college and do what normal eighteen year olds do. I’m not going to lie, it has been a tough process accepting that my life is so much different from theirs right now, but watching them start new lives for themselves has made me that much more excited to do the same thing. My new life is just across the globe instead of across the state. It finally clicked in my brain that the Race will start and the Race will end. It’s not my forever. The time between training camp and launch for me has been a lot of trying to figure out what I am going to be doing once I come back. So, with all my gear purchased and my college apps in it’s almost my turn to leave.
In a little under 2 weeks I will be headed to the Philippines to begin my journey. Holy cow. It is going to be quite a year.
