This past weekend/part of the week was training camp.
For some reason, I expected it to be team building and basically sitting around in a circle singing ‘koom-bi-ya”.
Let’s just say that that was not at all how it went down.
It ended up being this really intense spiritual encounter wherein God brought me through and healed me of a bunch of garbage that I didn’t even know I was still holding onto! I am happy to have had the experience NOW, but at the time, as I was crying in a ball on the bathroom floor with a very sweet girl named Hollis praying over me for a hour and a half… I wasn’t quite as excited about it. I felt like what I was up against was just too much.
But God…
God broke down my walls and built me back up- but this time completely ready and able to actually go on this trip- and not just fantasize about it.
I was confronting a lot of things all at once. For one thing, as you probably know by now, my husband will not be joining me on the race because he will be deployed to Afghanistan while I am away. But he thought it was very important to meet the group I would be with and show his support, so he came to the first 24 hours of training. He would have stayed longer, but he had his own pre-deployment training to go to. Anyway, on Sunday when he left for the airport, I was overwhelmed with this sadness. Not just because we would be apart for the next 3 days, but also because the reality of our situation finally hit me- this is serious. He is really going off to fight the war and I am really going to fight trafficking. And these battles will be fought apart from each other.
We do absolutely everything together. We eat and sleep together. We spend our free time together. We shower together. We even do our 3 hour daily commute to and from D.C. together- and we actually enjoy the rush hour traffic because we get to spend that time talking to each other! I used to be so fiercely independent before we got married- I could do everything myself. I didn’t need ANYONE’S help. But loving Jaimie has softened me to the point that I can’t imagine being apart from him for 6 months. And I can’t imagine being strong enough to go on this race without him.
I keep praying that God will help me to love Him more than I love Jaimie. But God is a tricky guy. He never causes me to love Jaimie LESS, but rather He expands my heart and my capacity for love… so I just end up being overwhelmed with love for both of them. I’m not really sure of how this is supposed to work- this marriage thing.
I am very thankful for the team that I have been blessed with for this journey- Team Nehimiah Project. Not to brag, but we are pretty awesome.
I don’t think it would be possible to be going on this journey with a better group of people. Honestly.
