I should be getting sleep since tomorrow is my last full day in my sweet home Alabama for over 11 months and I’m not exactly what you would call prepared, but instead you get a blog update.
First, thank you to everyone supporting my incredible teammates that are still pushing toward our support goals with your prayers. God’s already provided some awesome financial blessings in the last few days, and I ask for your continued prayers. He’s not done providing yet, and that’s a fact. If you feel called and able to help some wonderful people make sure they get to take part in this wonderful journey visit this blog from a few days ago: http://alexcole.theworldrace.org/?filename=back-from-training-and-i-need-help.
Secondly, another big travel update. If you’re fluent in your Slavic
languages, you’ve picked up an important clue as to where I’ll be soon.
I will be leaving from Newark June 15th and arriving in Kiev, Ukraine
the next day. Hence, the odd characters in my blog title. Now you all
know the Ukrainian word for two. You’re welcome.
Ok, now to finish up on training camp:
I feel like a really neat part about training camp was how none of us really knew each other. This allows us all to have a fresh start, and it also makes it so much more awesome that we love each other so much already. However, I think for my squad mates to truly see how much training meant to me and how much God is working in me they needed to know me before camp.
There’s two things I’ve not been a big fan of in the past that I totally loved at camp: the praise and worship portion of church and people, particularly new people.
I’ve never been against praise and worship in principle, but so often to me singing songs has just been a part of church you do before the preacher gives a sermon. How many times is there true life behind it? How often are we actually singing our words to God? Not often enough. This wasn’t a problem at camp.
The first several nights of camp we were blessed to have a wonderful worship band perform every night. (Jonathan David Helser. Check him out. Listening to him as I type this.) These praise and worship sessions would last over an hour which normally would have had me hiding in my tent, but these were different. They truly felt like communion with God. There was life to them. I loved them. The last night we worshiped for over 3 hours, and that didn’t bother me at all. God pushed me out of my box. He got me super in to it. Some people even joked that I pulled out an air guitar I got so in to it. While that’s absolutely untrue, it’s an indication of how much I had changed my normal opinions toward praise and worship.
God told me don’t care what other people think, just love Me and I did and it was awesome. All my worries and cares were gone, my focus was on God and I could have gone on forever. So that’s the first way God pushed me out of my comfort zone and started to change me.
Secondly, is my interaction with people. It’s true that I’ve become more social and outgoing as I’m gotten older. I’m no longer the college freshman that disappeared for an entire semester just to avoid people. (Not specific people. Just people.) But I still hate (actually, hated is the right word but that ruins the ending) talking to strangers and meeting new people. I’m just not comfortable at all.
This applied to me for the first like 90 minutes of training camp. I found myself purposely sitting with people I hadn’t talked to yet at meals so I could get to know them. Afterward, I’d wonder how in the world that had just happened. I fell in love with strangers in a matter of hours and now count them as friends for life. The team leaders led a commissioning service our last night and before we got started I picked up the microphone to tell everyone to come over and sit down. Ten minutes later I still had the mike and had been doing stand up jokes the whole time. Sadly, they’re all camp related and none of you would laugh if I told them now, but you would have if you had been there. Although everything’s funnier on little sleep.
There’s simply no way to explain these things other than God. That’s the only Alex these people have ever known. I so wish they knew old Alex, so they could see God moving me. Most of them, I think, still believe me to be a liar when I say I’m an introvert that used to avoid people at all costs. A teammate had a really exciting/scary thought: if God did all this to me in a week of training imagine what He can do in me in a year. Seriously though, I can’t even imagine.
In 12 days, I start the journey that will (I pray) change me for the rest of my life. If God has me singing, dancing, talking to strangers, and eating bananas already then watch out world because great things are coming. Am I right or am I right?
