Hello friends, family, and followers!
For months, I have been talking about and asking for prayer for my World Race Training Camp, and now I can finally tell you about it! Training Camp was a wild ride for me and for every person who goes on the World Race. This is the first of three posts about my Training Camp experience. In this post, I will be explaining what Training Camp is and telling you about my experience there.
Training Camp is a 10-day program for World Racers to prepare us for the mission field and the spiritual journey ahead. It is rigorous, thorough, and full. We start each day early with a workout, personal time, and breakfast. Each day has a theme or culture assigned to it, and we dress and eat accordingly. For Asia day, we ate with chopsticks; for Africa day, we wore ankle-length skirts and ate with our hands; and for adventure day, we ate bugs and strange meat. We slept outside in tents, showered with cold buckets of hose water, and used porta-potties (glamorous compared to the squatty potties we will be using throughout our Race).
Most of the day is filled with lecture-style teachings from Adventures in Missions employees and field scenarios. I won’t go too into detail about the field scenarios because I don’t want to spoil the surprise for future Racers, but they put us through multiple real-life scenarios we will experience on the field like varied sleeping arrangements, shopping in a marketplace, and packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking our things (we learned a valuable lesson in keeping our belongings mostly-packed at all times)! I loved the field scenarios and thoroughly enjoyed practicing flexibility and openness to change. It was awesome to be in a group of people where there was no complaining – ever! We took change and challenges in stride with positivity.
Another HUGE component of Training Camp is finally meeting the people we will be doing life and ministry with for the next year! My squad is called the C-sterhood. We are the 5th generation C-squad, and we are the first all-female World Race 11n11 squad! Here are my C-sters with our training team in a massive tent:
So many incredible words, proclamations, and prophecies were spoken over us. We were told that we had changed the culture of Training Camp through our radical unity not only with each other, but with the other two squads as well. We were told that we would do incredible things for the Kingdom this year. We are small but mighty! We are wild women chasing after Jesus!
Let me tell you about these women. I LOVE these women. We went from complete strangers to sisters in a matter of days. We shared laughs, tents, clothes, food, games, stories, sorrows, and joys. We walked through transformation together, dove into vulnerability, and cheered each other on through trials both physical and spiritual (we ALL passed the fitness hike!). We learned about Biblical unity and started walking it out. We declared over each other, “I choose you. And I will fight for you.” We worshiped God around a fire, led by the Spirit of God, and in that same night cast out demonic spirits, witnessed healing, and watched a dead fire roar back to life.
Our squad mentor, an incredible woman named Ashley Francis, who we affectionately call “Fran,” gave us a lesson on covenant that I will never forget. She told us about how in Bible times, salt was extremely rare and more valuable than gold. When merchants traded goods, to seal their deal, they would exchange a pinch of salt into each other’s salt storage (usually a small pouch they carried on their person). This exchange of salt bound the deal. If either were to break the deal, they would need to get their salt back… Impossible, right? You can’t distinguish one man’s salt from another once it has been mixed together. That is the same way we should treat covenant now. As a squad of women, we each signed a covenant to the Lord and to each other. Just a single piece of paper, but with so much weight attached to it. A weight we all choose to bear for the sake of Jesus, for the Kingdom, and for each other. We are bound to each other now, though salt. I’m PUMPED. This community is going to be a force to be reckoned within the Kingdom this year.
Another exciting thing that happened during camp is that we were assigned our TEAMS! These are the 6 women I will be living and working with every single day for at least the first month of the Race. Their names are linked to their blogs, so give them a follow so you can get every angle of my/our experience!
Ally –
Our team leader. She’s strong, honest, vulnerable, and gentle. She keeps a level head in crisis and thinks deeply before speaking. She is vlogging her World Race, so definitely go to her blog to see videos of what is going on in our lives!
Melissa –
Our Beauty for Ashes coordinator. She is creative, strong, and deeply compassionate. Her boldness in stepping into the “hard stuff” inspires us and drives us. She loves so well. She took our headshots, so I had to steal this picture from her Facebook page haha!
Lauren –
This woman. Wow, I love her. She was the first squadmate I met when I got to Atlanta and we went through the ringer together during Training Camp. She fought some serious battles of spiritual warfare and it was an honor to fight for her and alongside her. I love her heart, and am in awe of how much the Lord did in her life in 10 days.
Naomi –
Naomi is something special. She is humble and kind. She faces mistakes with self-confidence and willingness to learn and try again. She teaches me how to listen better and be brave. She is our team treasurer.
Carole –
This beautiful woman and I have been talking and getting to know each other for a few months; she lived in Richmond until a few weeks ago, so we had the opportunity to meet and get to know each other before TC. She has a deep passion for and understanding of Holy Spirit and His gifts. She and I shared a hammock (and body heat) one night and talked about how God has been challenging us. Doing ministry with her is going to be life-changing.
Rebecca –
A nurse from Arizona (aka I’m going to holler at her for all my sicknesses and injuries). She has great compassion for the hurting and the lost. Fiercely independent, learning to depend on us. I love learning her heart. We shared a tent our last night of Camp because I was too lazy to put mine up. I have so much to learn from her and through our friendship, and I am so excited to dig into it.
We are called the WILD FIRES. We may look foolish to the world, but we are a force for change in the Kingdom of God. Fire leaves a mark on everything it touches, and that is how we are going to live our lives this year.
We learned a lot about being the Body of Christ during Training Camp. Each and every woman on my squad is invaluable and irreplaceable. If one person were to not live to their fullest potential and live out the gifts of Holy Spirit, we would be missing a hand, or a foot, or an eye. I play two roles in this Body. I, first of all, have my spiritual gifts: shepherding and edification. These gifts empower me to care deeply for the women on my squad, care for them in their struggles and distress, and disciple them to deeper intimacy with Jesus. My second role, assigned to me by my leadership team, is the Unsung Hero Coordinator. In this role, I am on the lookout in all of the places we go for new and untouched ministry opportunities that may work well as ministry partners for future World Race teams. There will be months where my team will go into an area/region/city that is completely unreached by missionaries from Adventures, and we will ask the Lord to send us a Man of Peace and we will partner in ministry with them for the month. My mentor, Fran, told me I was selected for this role because I have a passion for seeing the unseen. I am humbled and honored to have been selected for this role and am very excited for how the Lord is going to magnify my faith through it.
That’s Training Camp! It was exhausting, empowering, and transformative. In my next blog post, I will go into detail about my personal Training Camp experience emotionally and spiritually.
To God be the glory forever!
xoxo Jess
