Hey Everyone,
Faith here! Austin and I are sharing a blog, this will be a great way to hear from both of us and individually. As we learned in training camp, we will be blogging once a week starting in January. If you haven’t subscribe, please do if you are wanting to follow our journey next year. Austin did a great job at what our training camp looked like over all. Go read his blog if you are wanting to know more.
As much as I loved training camp, I am also glad it is over. The past month was a whirl wind, we had to evacuate two weeks before we moved from Charleston to Greenville. That left us less than a week to have a yard sale and move. We moved on my birthday… yaye, and then had a day to unload the u-haul and get everything together to head out to training camp. Once we got to training camp, there was not a lot of down time. I am finally able to breathe and enjoy time in Greenville and hop back into community with some amazing friends.
First, I want to invite you all into what I learned at training camp. As Austin mentioned in the previous blog, the first part of the ten days was focusing on our relationship with God and who we are. I believe this was crucial to how the rest of the week went.
We focused on self and who God is first. We dug a little deep in our own self and what we find our worth in. As we moved from that, we transitioned into why Jesus came, He came to fulfill the law and for us to have abundant life with Him. We were able to reflect on grief or pain that hasn’t been resolved or needs to be resurfaced for us to gain more healing. We moved from that to forgiveness, forgiving self or others. For myself and others in my squad, the first part of the week was focused on what we needed to surrender to God, what we needed healing in, and how to forgive. I have been sharing with others that I am constantly surrendering my life to God. Surrendering my job, my home, my pets, and my comfort. The more I am looking at next year, I have to position myself to realize I haven’t fully surrendered some of those things until we actually leave. I had to work on forgiveness during training camp. There were a few things in my heart that I knew I acted like I have forgiven, but not verbally said out loud. I believe spoken words have power and more meaning. As I searched my own heart, I was able to process and move towards forgiveness.
One day out of training camp, the guys went away for a man hike. They hiked 12 miles while the girls stayed at camp. This was one of my favorite days. The time we had as girls was physical too, we had to do different challenges while facing different scenarios. We had to do it as a team and also talk about how we did in different areas. The way we bonded as girls was different, we needed to spend time working on us as women, the way we see ourselves and how we view others. We were open in a different way than we would’ve been if the guys were there. We also had fun! We got to have a little dance party, and also see how much we related on a serious note. The hurt, pain, past some of these girls have gone through is no joke. This was a huge eye opener, but also a way for us to uplift and encourage one another.
Our group bonded over different scenarios and living 3 ft from one another. We were quick to pray over one another, to accept and to be Jesus to one another. The last part of the week was talking about fun things like: visas, dress code, and vaccinations. We also talked about the importance of community and how that shapes others and ourselves. We are going to call each other into greatness and have a huge opportunity to grow and to challenge others as well. We were put into different teams throughout the week to see how we fit with each other, how communication works and who leads well. The reason behind this was we get split from 54 people in a squad ( which is everyone going on our route), to 7 people in a team. Our team is who we see day to day, live with, and do mission with along with the host family we get paired with. The teaming up from the staff takes almost all week, not knowing everything that goes into it, but knowing they put plenty of prayer and awareness. You can follow our team from our blog as well. They are listed to the left of the blog. We all said, we most likely wouldn’t put ourselves together, but in that, we have an amazing team. There are three guys and four ladies. I am excited to see what God throws at us next year and how we do life together in different countries.
Training camp over all was an amazing experience. It was time needed to bond and meet the others joining us next year. I already see them as family and know I can go to them for needs and prayers. It’s crazy what little sleep, no cell phones, bucket showers, different food, and Jesus can do with a group of people.
