Wow, I don’t even know where to begin in putting training camp into words. And if this is hard, I can’t imagine what it’ll be like to blog these next few months. I have several blogs I’d like to post, so bare with me as I get them up.
I will start by defining some terms that I will be using in my blogs to follow:
Squad: The 47 individuals that I will be traveling to each country with.
Z-Squad: The name of the squad I am on.
Team: The 6 or 7 individuals that serve together with a specific ministry in each country. So, our squad has 7 teams that will split up throughout each country. These teams can and will most likely change throughout the year.
Team Liora: The name of my current team. Liora is Hebrew for “the light of God in us”.
Squad Leaders: Two individuals that lead our entire squad and will hop between our different ministries over the month. This is initially two WR alumni, but after month five, two of our squad mates will be asked to fill this position for the remainder of the trip.
Team Leader: Each team has an identified leader whose primary role is to serve their team and communicate back with the squad leader on behalf of their team.
WR: World Race
TC: Training Camp
There are several more terms that may come up, but these are the first few that I though I might define for all of you.
Training camp was absolutely amazing. We camped, we took bucket showers, we killed large spiders (ok I didn’t, but I watched), we sang around a camp fire, we worshiped, we did training, we found out our team, and so much more. Basically training camp served the purpose of preparing us physically and spiritually for our journey to come. We went through many different simulations ranging from our sleeping conditions to needing to complete a 2 mile hike in under 40 minutes with our backpacks on (myself and 2 other squad mates actually broke the 22 minute record for this 🙂 ).
As for the spiritual side, we had many different training sessions where we worked on processing our past and hurts that we have each experienced. The intent of this is to help us begin to let go of the hurts we have so that we can be fully present with God. We quickly dove into being vulnerable and honest with our squad mates in talking about shame vs. guilt and many other deep topics. My biggest lesson takeaway was the idea that if we continue to believe that we are not forgiven for a sin that we have committed then we are saying that the blood Christ shed on the cross was not big enough for our sin. Hearing this hit me hard. There have been many times when I have felt like I could never be forgiven for some of the things I have done, and this has shown me that the real root of my problem is that I have not fully trusted that God is enough. Over this next month, I will be reflecting a lot on how and can overcome this view I have for so long believed. God is enough to fully redeem us.
We also learned a lot about what it looks like to become disciples ourselves so that we can then go out and create disciples of this world. I experienced the Holy Spirit in a whole new way and began to learn more about what it looks like to actually listen to God rather than always be the one to talk.
To top off such a transformational week spiritually, I also had the opportunity to dive into a brand new community. My squad mates are quickly becoming a second family and I am so excited to travel and spread the gospel with all of them.
I realize this blog is brief and does not go into much detail, but don’t worry! I will be posting several more that go deeper into several topics that God really had on my heart during training.
Here is a video of the week!
