The worship was passionate and the speakers were powerful. People were dropping to the floor, crying tears of pain, tears of joy…people were being healed…and people were encountering the Holy Spirit for the first time. The presence of the almighty God was in the room. But I felt numb.
God if you are in this place, moving all of these people to dance, to cry, to drop to their knees, than why am I not one of them? I didn’t understand why I wasn’t having waves of emotions run through me like it appeared everyone else was. I remembered my training camp from the year before, and all of those things happened to me, God broke down my every wall, my every fear, and my every insecurity, and He showed up in bigger ways than He ever has in my life. I guess I was expecting another transformational experience like that.
Midway through the week when I still hadn’t gotten that experience, the enemies lies started to seep into my heart, the biggest one, and scariest, was that God isn’t moving in me the ways He’s moving in all of the other people because I am far away from Him. Panic started to set in, but God is good and didn’t let it stay for long. That very night fear was entering my heart, we heard a talk about the Holy Spirit, about asking Him to come, and asking the Lord to really speak to us. I sat in my chair, squeezed my eyes shut, and gave it everything I had to hear the voice of the Lord. God not only silenced the voice of the enemy but crushed his lies. God gave me a picture (for the first time) It was a heart, not like a valentines heart, or emoji heart, it was a real human heart, a mass of tissue that doesn’t resemble the shape we draw in art class, and it had chains falling off, many already fallen to the floor. But the picture wasn’t vivid; it was off in the distance; God wasn’t showing me what’s to come though He was showing me what’s already been done. Those chains have been broken, and I have been healed.
God used my training camp last year to break me down, and He used my time in Central America to heal me, even after I came home God continued to mend both my heart and my spirit. That process was long, and a lot of the time it was painful, but it deepened my relationship with the Lord, it revealed so much about God’s love for me, and it was ultimately the process that prepared me for the World Race.
Training camp for me wasn’t about having huge revelations, or walking away a changed person. I had expected to encounter God the way I had encountered Him at training camp a year ago. But that was wrong of me. God is a creator. He wants to create new experiences with us. Think about it; if you and a friend only ever get coffee together, your relationship is going to be stagnant, you may have great conversations over coffee, but if you aren’t creating new experiences together you’re relationship doesn’t have the capability to grow much more. It’s the same with God. He is the creator so how much more should we expect Him to create new in our lives?
God did meet me at training camp, but in new ways, and that allowed me to walk away not as a new person but with a new perspective on who my God is and well that’s so much better isn’t it?
