So I know in my last blog that I talked some about training camp, but there was a lot of stuff I didn’t talk about. I know I talked some about how I was exhausted the first couple days, and how I was ready to be done with training camp in those first couple of days as well. Well that was partly because I had false expectations of how those first couple of days would go. I guess, for some reason, I had expected it to be like a big reunion. Everybody would see each other and immediately click, and we would all be super friendly super fast, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was awkward. I’m not great in social situations anyways, but it was like being in a campsite with a group of people I had never met or talked to before. I should have expected it to be that way because in reality we didn’t know each other at all, but for some reason I didn’t expect that. However, after accepting that reality I was amazed at how fast we really did bond. Maybe it was the atmosphere of camp, or maybe it was the fact that we knew these were the people we’d be spending a year with, but within a short time we all starting truly bonding.
We would meet as a squad pretty regularly at training camp. They would have us do exercises together, have us sit down and talk to each other, and a whole lot of other stuff. But I remember the first time they had us sit with each other and asked us to be real with each other. It wasn’t easy. After all we had still only known each other for a few days, but somehow I found myself sharing some parts of my heart with them that I never thought I would at training camp. In return they shared their hearts. It was really an amazing thing to see, a whole bunch of people who barely knew each other exposing the deep parts of their hearts to each other. For me that was a turning point at training camp. I think that was when I stopped being ready to go home and started wanting to engage more.
I know that for me training camp turned out to be so far from what I thought it would be. There was spiritual growth that I didn’t expect, revelations about myself, a breaking down of barriers, bonding, and just a whole lot more that I hadn’t ever expected to see at a 10 day training camp. I want to share that with all of you, but I can’t do it in a single blog post. So I’ll be writing several blogs about what God showed me at training camp.
