Hello everyone!
It’s been awhile since my last blog but now I have a TON to fill all of you beautiful people in on. I just returned home from training camp and it was intents! (ha,like ‘intense’ but we were camping). On a more serious note, training camp was by far the most draining and tiring thing I’ve done, yet one of the best and most rewarding two weeks of my life, so far.
To elaborate a little bit, I left July 5th and training camp was from the 6th to the 16th. The point of training camp is to prepare us for what we will experience on the field, give us a taste of some of the cultures we may experience, meet our squad and team mates, and help us to grow in our relationship with the Lord. Each day was filled with sessions, squad/team building, worship and having time to debrief everything we were learning with our team. To introduce different cultures, every day would represent a different country/continent that racers may be going to. For each specific day, we’d eat food that they would eat in those cultures and we’d have to follow cultural rules with how we dressed and how we ate. For instance, Asia was the first day. We ate a lot of rice, veggies and chicken and had to use chopsticks for utensils. For India day we ate with our hands, wore jeans or skirts that covered our ankles, and during meal time women would have to wear a head covering (most of us had to use tshirts).
Sessions each day dealt with a specific goal we were reaching/learning about that day. At the beginning of the week we were given a three circle venn-diagram that each had their own topic in it. The first dealt with missional living, the second was about intimacy with the Lord, and the third was about community. Each of these circles, when working together, bring kingdom. If we are going to go out on the mission field we need to have these three circles developed to be successful. The first three days were focused on missional living, the next three days were focused on intimacy and being vulnerable, and the last few days were all about community and what a healthy community looks like. Every day was filled with so much good information it’s taken me a bit to process it all. However I must say the days that impacted me the most were the days about intimacy (there will be a blog dedicated to all the awesome things the Lord did coming soon!).
While the sessions were great, and everyday was its own adventure with the different foods we were eating, one of the best things about training camp was meeting my squad. I am apart of Gap L and honestly it feels like it’s where I’m meant to be. I was so nervous the first day or so but as we dove further in, they all started to feel more and more like family. I’ve never experienced a community like this in my life and it was only ten days. I can’t wait to see what nine months brings! My squad is so amazing, I feel like we each bring our own strength to the table and I’m so excited to see how God uses each of them on the field.
So that was a quick run-down of training camp and I will post many more detailed blogs about what I learned in the near future! As this adventure continues to launch, I’m so excited to say that I have met my first goal of $5,000 and am now working on my next goal of $10,000! If you would like to donate head the the home page of my blog and select donate! Any amount would help greatly!
Peace and blessings!
