“That’s crazy,” said the marine sitting next to me on my flight home. Apparently camping for 10 days under the Georgia sun is a less than ideal pastime in the south. He must have sensed my intense need for chocolate because he gave me the brownie from his airplane meal. He slept, I processed – the latest Imagine Dragons tour playing on the tiny screen in front of me, brownie wrapper in my hand.
Training camp was crazy.
It was meeting and falling in love with 55+ people before knowing much more than their hometowns and spirit animals. It was having trouble breathing at night due to high humidity levels. It was accurately using the term “sweating buckets” for the first time. It was using a bucket to shower. It was hiking, running, pushups and planking. It was even eating crickets for breakfast (OK only one, but still).
We slept everywhere – in our tents, in other people’s tents, in the woods under a tarp, in a room made to look, feel and sound like an international airport. We worshiped like nobody’s business – like I’ve honestly never danced so much while worshipping. We were prayed for, poured into, spoken over and absolutely wrecked over and over again.
Before training camp, I had said goodbye to a collegiate life that I absolutely loved and moved back in with my family. The transition was much harder than I had anticipated. My thought life was out of control and I was experiencing all kinds of spiritual warfare (read more here). I arrived in Gainesville feeling more than a little distant from the Lord and more than a little insecure about it. I have always struggled with comparison and stepping off the bus into what first appeared to be adult Christian camp didn’t help any.
The firs sessions we attended were meant to build us up and feed our souls, and while I won’t go into what each of them were about, I will say that the Lord addressed every single thing I had been struggling with these past few weeks and more. He told me I had to stop listening to myself and start listening to what He had to say about me. He showed me the faulty way I had been viewing Him and the way I wanted Him to work. He told me that He doesn’t hold my past sins over my head and remind me of them every time I sin again. He revealed to me that there were people in my past that I still need to forgive and there were people in my present that I needed to cut emotional ties with. He told me through a man who knew only my name and nothing else about me that God has always had His eye on me and will never leave me.
The craziest part about training camp was how not crazy it was.
I know that sounds backwards, but think about it. That’s our God. He meets us where we’re at. He speaks to us through His word, through songs, through people we don’t really know or haven’t met. He heals physical maladies and emotional wounds. He enables us to do things we didn’t know were possible. Through Jesus these things aren’t crazy. They’re normal.
For those of you following my journey, thank you so much for your continued prayer and support. Both have gotten me through to where I am now. My current prayer requests have to do with the most impactful lessons I left training camp with. The first is that I would stop treating the Holy Spirit as a visitor in my life and instead as a permanent resident. The second is that I would stop viewing myself as a World Racer and start viewing myself as a child of God. My acceptance into this program, my adventurous spirit, my compassion, my communication skills are not what qualify me to go on the race. Being a daughter of the living God is the only thing that qualifies me to go inspire the nations.
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Meet N Squad! This is the group of people I got to know during training camp and the group I will be launching with and traveling from country to country with.
And this is my team! Team Enabled! Meet (from left) Hendrika, Zack, Alyssa & Andrew, Jonathan and Mariana. We’ll be together for the first couple of months.
