(to view this post with pretty pretty pictures, go to chasethelightwithme.com)
Training camp… wow. I don’t even know where to begin! The whole experience was a rollercoaster– I mean I had a full-blown panic attack before I even boarded the plane! But in the end, the whole rollercoaster was amazing. I am COMPLETELY in love with my entire squad–the Lord fit us all together perfectly.
The week started out pretty rough; I think the staff wanted to kind of overload us at the beginning just to get the hard stuff over first. And honestly I have never had any kind of exposure to “charismaticâ€� worship; I grew up in a “liberalâ€� Southern Baptist church, but this was waaaaaaay beyond my comfort zone. That combined with the reality of 11-months-away-from-home thing just completely overwhelmed me. The second night, my new friend Ashley (from Wisconsin–I’ll call her Wisconsin from here on out 🙂 and I were seriously thinking we were going to be buying plane tickets home early.
Yeah. It was that bad.
BUT the Lord is so good; He brought us through that night, and the next day as we started talking to other people on our squad, we started realizing that we were ALL in the same boat. The majority of people were just like me, and so we just started processing everything together, and it made the biggest difference. The enemy deals in death and divisiveness–one of his biggest tricks is to make us feel alone. And talking to people on my squad made me realize that I was not alone; we were all dealing with the same issues. So we just talked it through together; anytime that I started feeling freaked out or overwhelmed, I could always find someone else who was processing the EXACT same thing.
We had training camp with the July squad also, and it was just incredible how obvious it was that the Lord had put people on different squads for a reason. The people on July were INSANE– so loud, so crazy: shouting, chanting, singing, dancing, ALL the time. My squad is so wonderfully laid back 🙂 it became the joke of the whole camp that they whenever the July-ers were going crazy, no doubt you would find the June squad somewhere nearby just chilling, talking, laughing, and throwing a frisbee around. It just bonded both squads together because we all related to each other in such different ways.
The first two days brought a lot of reality-check moments… “After months and months of thinking and planning, is this actually happening? Am I really standing in a field in the middle of the woods in Georgia with 50 complete strangers, talking about our feelings around tiki torches at 11:30 at night??â€� The next few days were so so so so so so so much better. The rest of the week was all about team-building, so we played some CRAZY fun games, including one that involved a plane crash and being chased by cannibals–it was really fun 🙂
One day about halfway through the week, they told us we were “moving outâ€�–we had twenty minutes to grab a moving buddy, and pack ONE pack between the two of us for the rest of the day and night– no tents! We would be building “shelterâ€�, digging our “toiletâ€�, and cooking our food out there.
Whaaa???
I was SO excited! I was kind of shocked actually–that I, little miss “HOLY S*** SOMEONE COME KILL THIS SPIDERâ€� was actually pumped about sleeping outside in the middle of the woods in Georgia! It was just new and exciting for me, and I had a BLAST! I’m still not on friendly terms with spiders, but my tolerance did go up just the teeniest bit while out there.
So Wisconsin and I packed up our bag and headed out. We hiked and canoed our way to the other side of the lake and set up camp. A group of people set to work on dinner, and Kris(ten), Wisconsin and I set out in a canoe to explore the beautiful lake! It was a great night of fun and games and fellowship with just our squad, talking and laughing around the campfire (and occasionally listening to the July squad singing and cheering from their camp…on the other side of the lake). We “slept� under the stars that night! (I would have enjoyed it much more if I had had a sleeping bag, particularly since this was the one night it got down to low 50s. [I’m from Texas; that was freezing.] But I wasn’t alone! Kris was awake, freezing right along with me. Like I said, there was always someone in the EXACT same boat!)
The last day we were there, we got to have a little taste of ministry overseas–there’s a whole blog on that coming up later 🙂
I have never experienced community quite like that week. Here were 45+ complete strangers from different places and different backgrounds being thrown together in the middle of the woods in Georgia… can you blame me for panicking at the beginning?? But after 8 months… I mean days… at camp, I can’t imagine doing this trip with anyone else. I didn’t know it was possible for me to love a group of people that much in such a short time! I absolutely cannot wait to chase the Lord around the world with them.
