For those of you wondering, training camp played a huge part in my life. It is hard to tell all of the stories that I have from these short 10 days, and is impossible to shorten things down because there’s so much information behind everything, but God laid something on my life I believe I need to share that changed my walk with God.
So I love to play guitar, and although I think I sound like a dying whale I enjoy singing while worshiping. We played a game on day 2 of camp which involved screaming and I lost my voice to the point where it hurt to talk above a whisper. A few days later we started a short little series of sessions on listening prayer. Basically being able to ask God to speak to you and hearing from him. I thought it was impossible so I didn’t really care and didn’t even pay attention to one of the sessions on it (mostly because I may have knocked out for a minute or four). But something didn’t feel right and I felt the need to take notes during the sessions.
I never take notes. I have 4 blank binders from senior year that proves that. But I did it, and I started to learn and it interested me so much. I started to try it and while my teammates kept hearing things, I wasn’t. I would actually make things up to make it seem like I was hearing from God. We were sat down in a circle and asked to talk to God. Whenever he would reveal something you would speak it to the group. I said everything I could think of but none of it was God, and for some reason a red bouncy ball popped into my head. It was really just the emphasis on the color of red and that was it. I didn’t say it because I thought it sounded stupid. Then as we were ending one of my teammates shared an image of two trees on top of a hilltop and I didn’t really make a connection with it so I forgot about it.
Later that day we were practicing pathways of worship and I found myself at the nature pathway. It was hot and I didn’t want to be there so while everyone else walked off into the woods and sat in the grass I found a nice, comfy, padded chair and sat in the shade under a fan. They told us to pray and ask God to reveal something to us through nature. Y’all, I stared at a bush for 25 minutes and heard NOTHING. I was so frustrated at what a waste of time this was and at that moment, I felt a peace come over my body and heard the need to just relax and listen.
Eventually I saw these two trees off in the distance towards the top of a hill in the woods. One was bright and full of life and the other looked like it was about to fall over it was so dead. At that moment I heard something say “You are both of those trees”. I thought about it and it was revealed to me that the living tree is the side of me I try to show everybody. This good little Christian guy that never messes up and always does whatever is needed. Then the dead tree was shown as the side of me that I hide from people and never want to reveal because if I do I will just get knocked down. Then time was up and we moved to the next station.
Later that night we had worship and I could just feel the spirit moving in the room. We left all of the chairs outside and everyone was sitting on the ground. While we were singing I felt God tell me to go pray strength and boldness over every guy on my squad. Since it was loud I wrapped my arms around every guy individually and started to pray over them in their ears. I started to bawl as I was praying because I could tell it was the first time I could literally feel God. I was trembling. I finished praying over the 10th guy just in time for the start of one of the most phenomenal messages I have heard (but that’s another blog for another day).
Everyone then went into another moment of worship and I was just sitting on the floor thanking God for everything he had blessed me with and apologizing for everything I had been taking for granted. While I was praying, I felt hands on my head and my shoulder and I heard the voice of a woman I knew from camp but had never spoken to before talking to me. She said, “Andrew, we haven’t really talked before but God wants me to share an image that I don’t really know will apply to you, but I’m going for it. Right now he is revealing the image of a giant Redwood Tree.” I start busting out laughing. Not because I thought it was stupid, But I was hysterically laughing because I didn’t know what else to think of such a perfect image that she had no idea was perfect for my situation. The trees my teammate revealed that I saw in the nature pathway, the random red bouncy ball I saw, IT ALL TIED TOGETHER.
She was talking about how redwood trees connect at the roots and branches and feed energy off of each other to survive and that’s what I had been thinking about my team all week. We are all pretty independent people, but without each other these next 9 months would be impossible. This was the first time I had ever actually been able to hear God speaking to me and I didn’t know what to think I was so blown away. Y’all, God is good. He does so much that we don’t see right at first and we don’t understand it. But the moment he decides to reveal it to us is the moment that we get to see what a truly awesome God we have the opportunity to have a relationship with. This isn’t just a religion. Our God is alive and he wants to have a personal relationship with us. Now how cool is that?
