How do I even put the last ten days of training camp into words? I’m sitting here on my couch, after having the privilege of a warm shower and a night in my own bed in a warm apartment, and my mind is still whirling from the extremes that God took me to.
My heart was like a broken bone.
The human bones have a flexibility level that makes it capable of resisting forces applied to it. However, once a powerful force that exceeds the resistance level of the bone is applied, the bone absorbs the shock causing it to break or fragment.
Displaced fractures are considered more serious and severe because the bone fragments could be in many pieces and probably moved out of their proper positions. In displaced fractures, the distortion of the injured area is usually very visible and causes extreme bouts of pain. Displaced fracture symptoms include:
Tenderness
Pain
Numbness
Swelling
Deformity on the injured area
Extreme pain when the affected area is moved
Inability to do any normal movements
Do any of those symptoms sound familiar to you? My heart was completely displaced, and I never allowed it to heal properly. At times my heart felt such extreme pain, and at other times it became completely numb. Between the pain and then the numbness, I had formed myself into a person that could no longer function the way it was created to function. I didn’t allow myself to be vulnerable, I didn’t allow myself to love, I didn’t allow myself to forgive, and I most certainly did not allow myself to be happy. I had stopped being in the moment because I was too busy looking back on the past.
God had to completely break me again, so he could start healing me the right way. When a fracture heals it becomes inflamed, and the fractured area swells. When the pain and swelling decrease, the fracture stiffens, and new bone begins to form, but cannot be seen yet. After awhile, that new bone begins to bridge the fracture, and this is when you can finally see it on an X-ray. The fracture site remodels itself, correcting any deformities that may remain as a result of the injury. This final stage can last up to several years.
This is what God is doing with my heart. He reached into the darkest places of my heart, and pulled my soul out into the light.
When I first arrived to the airport in Atlanta, GA, I was so focused on picking up my backpacking pack up from baggage claim that I later realized I had walked right past my squad. It wasn’t until I was sitting at a table eating lunch alone that I saw them sitting in a circle.
All of a sudden insecurities started pouring over me. What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t make any friends? How open about myself should I be to them? How should I even approach them?
As it turns out I didn’t just make friends, God gave me an incredible new family instead.
The first night during praise, I realized I had never been exposed to anything like this before, it was almost overwhelming. I was literally standing in a room full of 250 young people who had all come from brokenness, and somehow through the messy parts of each of our lives God had literally brought us all here together in that room, to restore us, to uplift us, to show us our worth, to love us, to make disciples who make other disciples.
“Set a fire down in my soul, that I can’t contain that I can’t control, I want more of you God.”
There is a reason you don’t read detailed blogs about what each day holds at training camp, and it’s because for those who have yet to do it, the unknown is what makes it so effective. You can’t plan each and every day; we don’t have control over the things that come our way, we only control what we do with those things. You have to be flexible, you have to be interruptible.
By the middle of the week, I had shared parts of my story during group sessions that not even the closest people to me knew about, and I had learned that I had spent so much of my life feeling like I was alone in my pain, that I was the only one going through certain things, and feeling that no one could possibly understand what I was going through when in reality I was far from alone.
I had learned about who I truly was instead of the false self that I had been hiding behind, the identity that I had created and re-created throughout the years to please others and to please God. The enemy does his best work in the dark, which is why you have to bring to light the real issues, the things we don’t say, the things that are uncomfortable to talk about, that we are afraid others will judge us for or not accept us for.
I learned that God’s grace and mercy for me was bigger than any mistake I had made, and that while our choices can have consequences, grace would not keep any account of my wrong doings.
For so long I had shut downmy emotions, and by doing that I had shut down a part of who I was. An analogy that I was able to relate to was that my emotions had been like a beach ball under the water, being pushed down until it all surfaces at once. Unfortunately, there are many people in my life that have been the victims of that. Yes, I have been so hurt, but I have also done just as much hurting to others.
My most memorable night came when God taught me forgiveness of myself and to forgive others. Before I knew that was what we would be talking about, during praise, I was impressed to start praying for a recent person in my life that I hadn’t even realized I still felt a lot of hurt from. I prayed for his happiness, I prayed that God would let him know how much He loves him just for who he is, that he didn’t have to create a false version of himself. I asked God to release anything left in my heart towards him. I think God knew I needed to do that on my own terms. When praise was over, our topic of the night was of course forgiveness, go figure.
By the end, it had come to my attention at how bitter a person I had become. That holding onto anger and unforgiveness had been eating away at my very core for such a long time. I realized that it was a one way street, that the only person I was hurting was myself. The floor became open for anyone who wanted to forgive the people in their lives that had hurt them the most and give them to God.
As I watched people around me get up, I sat there alone, trying to fight the tears. Those people kept replaying in my mind, and I began re-living all the terrible things they had done, and all of a sudden I felt everything… ALL the hurt, ALL the pain, ALL the anger, it ALL boiled to the surface, screaming to get out, and I was trying to push it back down. In my mind I was pleading with God, telling him I didn’t have the strength to let it go, I wasn’t strong enough to forgive those things on my own.
That is when out of no where one of the leaders on my team came and grabbed me out of the crowd and asked, “What is running through your mind right now?” Without answering I started sobbing. She held me and said, “I will stand in right now for whoever you need to forgive, just say it out loud to my face, as if they are right here.” Sobbing on her shoulder I began saying those names out loud… each time feeling the load on my shoulders getting lighter and lighter.
When I was done she held me and said, “You are a worthy woman of God. For all the pain you have felt and for all those people that hurt you, on their behalf I will say that I am sorry, and that you didn’t deserve any of it.”
It didn’t stop there. Afterwards, God spoke through another leader telling me that whatever I was battling with that God loves me, that he is good and he is gentle, and that I can trust him. It was God’s way of telling me that he saw me, he saw my pain, and that he cared, and that He could love me past the pain.
For future racers all I know it this, during training camp you will be really hungry, you will be physically put to the test, you will be cold if it is in October, you will be awake before the sun comes out, you will have sleepless nights, you will be exhausted, you will take bucket showers or not even shower at all, your limits will be pushed, you will laugh, you will sing, you will dance, you will definitely cry, you will learn life lessons, you will have truth spoken into you, you will build community, you will find family, you will make friends, you will see God, and you will be spiritually fed.
Surrender it all to him, the good, the bad, and the ugly; He wants all of you. He asks us to come as we are, but he doesn’t leave us there.
