Ten days, two ER trips, and many showers later I am home from training camp! At training camp I had the privilege of meeting all 47 of my squad mates, from Oregon to Florida we are coast to coast. With ages ranging from eighteen to twenty, I’d say it’s a pretty diverse bunch. But over the span of ten days I have been wrecked by God and by the Georgia heat. In this duration of time about 300 participants will live on the AIM campus and go to lectures and listen to pastors, AIM employees, and whomever else. The lectures would range in topics, from explaining fiscal law on NPO donations to discerning God’s voice. To put it frankly, it was the most exhausting and rewarding ten days of my life.
You might be curious where 300 twenty-year old’s’ were being kept in the boonies of Georgia for ten days, so let me fill you in: most days we slept in our tents and took bucket showers from the water hose. But don’t worry AIM kept it interesting for us, to prepare participants for potential realities of the race we would sleep through simulations. For instance, we slept in “airport conditions” which looked like sleeping indoors with our carry on and very loud airport noises courtesy of a Youtube clip. Others looked like community living (15 people in a large tent), and a lost bag (which meant I shared my clothes, toiletries, etc. for a 24-hour span with a squad mate). By doing all of this we were prepared for seventeen-hour layovers or cramped sleeping quarters! It was surprisingly comfortable and had it not been for my more than compassionate squad mates I’m sure it would have been a lot harder. But lucky for me, everyone is always willing to share and has two of most things!
But lets backtrack, I can’t mention two emergency room trips without some sort of explanation. So apparently every seven years your body goes through a transition and since I’m coming up on that seven-year mark, I’m now an asthmatic! Which I found out years ago but never effected my life until recently, so doofus me left my inhaler at home. Which as you can predict didn’t go well for me, so I paid a visit to my local hospital!! And the second ER visit you ask? Macadamia nuts in chocolate chip cookies!! Anaphylactic shock is not my best look let me tell you, but the Lord is good, and epinephrine is great! All of this is to say Satan works hard, but the Lord works harder. I’m not going to lie to guys, I was more than shaken up by the frequency of hospital visits. But the Lord was prevalent in it all and the power of prayer had never been more relevant to me than it was then. I also learned the power of words, I had spent about four days sick to my stomach from the narcotics and prescriptions and was feeling pretty gross. But I had been advised to repeat the phrase “The Lord is my strength and my healer, I will be healed.” And the Lord worked big time through that for me.
So what was the take away of this ten days? That the next nine months of my life are going to be the most grueling and uncomfortable yet. They are also going to be the most intimate moments with Christ and I’ll be living in a community of people I will cherish for the rest of my life. There were some realizations that absolutely wrecked my heart, but what I can’t get off my mind is Matthew 10:8, “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Give as freely as you have received.” Give as freely as you have received, so dang simple. But equally as wrecking!! I assure you!! I also really loved a lecture given by a lady named Karen, she talked a lot about hearing God’s voice and what you should do with it. But what I took away from it was; don’t make your relationship with God into a religion. Keep it a relationship, do as He asks’ of me, and keep a yes in your spirit!! Go where He calls and do what He’s asked. Having a relationship with Jesus is as simple as you make it, which once again felt Earth shattering to my ears. I had a lot of those moments, I had a lot of broken moments and as it turned out so did everyone else. But above that, remembering that Jesus doesn’t have expectations for us, because He knows how broken we are. That we will constantly let Him down and He will still love us in spite of our brokenness. Because let’s face it as an almost twenty-year-old I have made plenty of a mess of myself, but Jesus sees me for me. He knows my mess and loves me for it, and that was the best realization of all. That I was made in God’s image and that to not like myself or think I’m not good enough for God is insulting to Him. I am the daughter of my Father in Heaven and I was made to love Him.
So even though I was a hot mess express for the duration of TC, I still felt so cherished by Jesus. Which to say the least was the best two weeks I’ve ever taken off of work.
Okay okay, so I’ve told you about me. So let me tell you about my 46 new lifelong friends! They are awesome: most of them just recently graduated high school, some dropped out from college, and others are pursuing different lines of work. Within my squad of 47, we were divided up into teams of seven to eight. By doing this we kind of have a “home base” if you will for throughout the entirety of the race, I will also be living with these girls all year. They are so dang wonderful and intentionally placed into my life by the Lord, it is W I L D. Attached to the blog is a vlog of my squad, we didn’t have our phones most days of TC so the video is mostly from squad wars. Which is where squads S, T, U, and V battled it out via pool noodle battles and other camp-like games. So you have a snapshot of what it all looked like!
Now what? Now I have seven weeks stateside before I launch into the World Race Gap Year Program.
S e v e n w e e k s.
In between then and now, I will be fundraising as I am only 47.35% of my total goal, I will also finish out my internship with Compass Mortgage and prepare to leave all comfort the U.S offers!! But no worries I will be eating plenty of Portillos and drinking lots of Dunkin iced. So please donate your prayers, your money if you feel led to, and ask me all about TC because I’m psyched to tell you all about it!
xoxo
