Training Camp – ten days that felt like ten months in the best way possible.
Physically, I was prepared for what happened there. I knew there would be travel simulations that would cause lack of sleep. So I needed to sleep in an airport one night? Been there – all over the world. Lost my tent for a night and had to hammock? Been there too. There was a fitness hike requirement, but hiking is how I fill most of my free time. Nailed it. Yeah, the porta-potties got a little fuller than I was comfortable with, showering out of a bucket took some getting used to, and Atlanta was not nearly as warm as I somehow convinced myself it would be in October. Camping in forty-degree weather for ten days, turns out, is not ideal. However, these were all things I knew about going in.
Here’s what I wasn’t ready for:
I wasn’t ready to have my faith completely dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. I wasn’t ready to be confronted with parts of my past that I’d really rather forget, regardless of whether I felt closure. I wasn’t ready to question everything I believed, and why I believed it. I wasn’t ready to encounter the Holy Spirit in such a consistent and profound way for ten days straight. I wasn’t ready to come face-to-face with my own lack of faith. I wasn’t ready to feel so loved and so accepted by this new community, even after getting to know each other real well, real quick for a week and a half.
That alone is a lot to unpack, but here’s the kicker that really encapsulates all of it: I wasn’t ready to feel like I was qualified enough to do this in the first place. This is where I want to camp for awhile, because the reality check I got about myself during this time was enough to emotionally floor me for several days, even after I landed back home. I still feel like I haven’t fully processed everything that I learned, or everything that I experienced. Even as I write this, I’m combing back though my copious amounts of notes trying to figure out what even happened. Here’s the baseline: I’ve been living in apathy about my faith for SO LONG, while still doing the church thing, that I don’t even know which of me is real anymore, and that right there is why I struggled to feel qualified to have even gotten to this point.
Rewind to February. The World Race routes had just been announced for this upcoming January, and I had labored away at my application – the application I had been waiting to fill out for five years – for almost a week. After pouring my heart into my answers, which would be read by people I had never met and were interspersed with honesty I hadn’t even given some of my best friends, I sat back and waited for the call that would undoubtedly inform me that I wasn’t good enough.
When I confessed these fears to friends and family, however, I was met with a universal response: “You are perfect for this. If they don’t choose you, I don’t know what they are looking for.” Rather than make me feel better, this encouragement instead made me question my identity even further. It made me relive every sin I had ever committed, and every mask I had ever put on to cover my behavior up for the church people. It led me into a spiral of self-doubt that, if I’m honest, lasted until training camp just a couple weeks ago. Going in, I thought surely, this is where they will realize their error. This is where I will be exposed as a fraud. A failure. I will be surrounded by a team of spiritual giants, and it will be painfully clear that I do. not. belong.
Interestingly enough, I was wrong.
I realized this almost immediately because, as it turns out, I was not alone in my fears. Several, likely a majority, and maybe even all, of my teammates felt the same way to varying degrees, and it came up in conversation even before camp officially started. In addition to that, my teammates also have some pretty messy pasts, and we all somehow landed in the same place regardless. This was not an accident. (Aside – you can read more about that here. The people I get to spend the next year with are actually incredible. Every one of them).
After this realization, I proceeded to spend the rest of my time at camp trying to figure out what that meant. Okay, God. If I’m not gonna get kicked out, and I am in fact supposed to be here, then show me where the hell I fit into all of this. This is probably a question I should have been asking from the beginning, but that’s not the point. Luckily, throughout the ten-day training, I had the privilege of listening to some incredible speakers who did a pretty good job of answering that for me. Like I mentioned earlier, my faith was quite literally torn apart in front of me and rebuilt from the ground up. No stone was left unturned, and my identity was solidified further than I think it’s ever been.
So, after that wildly long-winded introduction, here is what training camp (re)taught me about who I am, and why I am, against my own doubts, qualified to be here:
I am forgiven. This is the basis of our faith, and so often I blow it off without truly unpacking what it means. When I struggled to feel like I was ‘good enough’ for the Race, or for God in general, I was struggling to forgive myself. I somehow could not get myself passed my past mistakes to realize that none of that matters anymore. I was blindsided with this truth four days into camp: Unforgiveness towards myself will destroy me. Jesus’s sacrifice was enough for God. Why, then, isn’t it enough for me? Talk about a slap in the face. How can I say, in the face of this, that I am unqualified? However inadequate I feel, the forgiveness that Jesus offers is always enough.
I am a partner. I am well aware that God does not need me to get His work done. In fact, I often think that He would be better off if I stopped trying altogether. Going into camp, all I could ask myself was ‘What could I possibly have to offer?’ Coming out on the other end, the question flipped into ‘Where do I need to follow God’s voice?’ Honestly, all I have to offer is obedience, and that is all God has ever wanted. Sure, He could do the work Himseld, but He desires a partnership with us that goes far beyond us taking orders. He asks only that we finish the work that He started so long ago, not sit back and wallow in self-pity, thinking we aren’t good enough.
I am empowered. The partnership between us and God goes both ways. He did not simply abandon us to clean up this mess of a world on our own, hoping to one day come back to find all of its problems taken care of. He provides us, every day, with the Holy Spirit to be our guide. Training camp unpacked that idea for me beyond anything I had ever come close to experiencing, and it has changed the way that I interact with Him. It’s easy for me, as part of the Western church, to read a Bible full of miracles and pass it off as something that simply doesn’t happen in present day. I regularly found myself thinking, ‘God doesn’t work that way anymore,’ or, ‘Even if He did, He would never use me to perform a miracle!’
Why not, though? I have been given the same Holy Spirit that the disciples had in the New Testament, not some watered down, weaker version. In light of that, there is no reason to expect God to use me any differently than He used the first century church that I’ve put on a pedestal as some unattainable utopia. I have been given that power, and in light of that, how in the world can I stand before God and say He can’t use me? The truth is, everything I’ve read about God doing in Scripture is the least I can expect from Him. I just need to learn to lean into that and listen to His calling.
I am victorious. If everything else hadn’t already done it for me, this would have been the nail in the coffin for my doubts. I am fighting a battle that, ultimately, has already been won. Granted, it can be very difficult to have that perspective in the middle of trials and difficult temptations. However, the fact remains that in the end, we are battling a defeated enemy. God has already disarmed him, and the only weapons he truly has to use against us are the ones that we hand him ourselves. I have handed him a lot of ammunition over the years that has fed into my apathy and doubts, and more often than not, those feelings have been dominant over my decisions. I’m learning more and more, though, how to combat that. Training camp was a much-needed perspective shift away from this negativity, and I’ve come out on the other side feeling much more confident about the direction that I’m headed.
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I meant what I said at the beginning about these ten days feeling like ten months. That list up there doesn’t even come close to covering everything I learned or experienced, but it’s enough to get the point across. I felt like I was drinking from a firehose the whole time, and I absolutely loved it. This whole experience was a time not only of drawing closer together in community, like I wrote about last week, but drawing closer to God. For me, it was also about rediscovering who I am as His follower, and listening to Him, over and over and over and over, tell me that I am enough. I am loved. And I am absolutely, exactly where I’m meant to be.
