Honestly, training camp was exhausting in every way—mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But it was the good kind of exhausting. The kind of exhausting that comes from being pushed closer to God, deeper into community as He desired it for us, and into a greater understanding of who God created us to be as individuals.
Before I get into my emotional and spiritual experience, I will share about some of the fun we had. During the two weeks we were at training camp, I got to personally know and love each one of our squad mates (there are 32 of them, plus Kaydan and me) for the upcoming year! I can see God’s hand all over our squad, as He has beautifully hand picked each and every one of us to experience Him together next year. We got to do a lot of team building exercises, before we were given our wonderful team (there are 6 of us) that we will get to do life and ministry with up close and personal for the first few months of our Race. We laughed and cried together, ate food with our hands together, and hugged and prayed together continuously. We are basically family now.
Not only did we get to bond with our new family, but we also got to practice scenarios that will probably happen on the field. We slept in tents, “lost our bags in the airport”, took freezing cold bucket showers, hiked a few miles with our packs on, ate crickets, and slept under the stars together. We even went shopping for dinner in a crazy “foreign market” and slept in an “airport” for practice. Some of the scenarios were downright hilarious, but all had a purpose in preparing us for the next year and for teaching our squad how to support each other as the body of Christ should.
I came into training camp with a lot of anxiety, some that I knew I was carrying and some that kind of snuck up on me halfway through training camp. Here were a few of my concerns…
- Self-worth anxiety that I didn’t know the full extent of
- Fundraising
- Marriage on the World Race
- Vulnerability with people we barely knew
- The role of the Holy Spirit in all this
- Evangelism
- My testimony
Throughout training camp, God slowly made me look at each of these areas of anxiety and willed me to believe His truth about them, rather than the lies I had been telling myself. I was continuously reminded throughout training camp that God loves me so much more than I could ever imagine, and that His truth and His plans for my life are always abundantly better than my own.
I won’t get into the nitty gritty about how each of these anxieties were alleviated, but I do want to share about a few.
The Holy Spirit
I have never doubted the presence of the Holy Spirit or His role in convicting us and reminding us of God’s goodness. I just forget a lot of times that I am supposed to be led by the Holy Spirit, and sometimes I wonder what that looks like. We saw the Holy Spirit do some crazy stuff these past couple of weeks, and it was a reminder to both Kaydan and me that we should not try to keep Him in a box. Instead, we should let Him do His job in leading us. And why would we want to hold Him back when He wants to give us His fullness?
Also, our team name (Team Magic School Bus) is a reminder to our team of the ways that the Holy Spirit showed up in our lives at training camp, and that opening up to Him, rather than limiting Him always proves to be abundantly fruitful. It is also a reminder that God has given us different abilities to be able to learn from each other and empower each other to grow. So if you are really curious, ask Kaydan or me about the magic school bus story, and we would love to share!
Evangelism and My Testimony (and a SUPRISE!)
We went out to evangelize with our team one day toward the end of training camp. I was scared, and I even went as far as to say that I hated evangelism—which doesn’t sound very Christian of me, does it? But I think one of the reasons I was so nervous is that I know a big part of evangelism is telling the story of how Christ changed you, or in other words, your testimony. And my testimony has always been something I have struggled with. I grew up in church and I got baptized when I was about 10. But when I think back on my life, I can’t remember much about the time before I got baptized or even the time when I did get baptized. I know that I understood the Gospel and that I believed that Jesus had come to earth to die for me. But I was not sure that I could see a change in my life. And I am not sure that as a 10 year old I fully grasped what following Him would look like.
Looking back on my life, there was a certain time period where I did see a big change. During my junior year of high school, I was feeling lonely and without friends. That year, I sought God and found Him to be my Best Friend, the one who would always stick by me. I found comfort in His Word, and I found conviction that I was not at all good without Him. I learned to better read His Word, which I contribute mostly to a discipleship group and a mentor that I cherish. And I fell in love with God all over again. People told me I was different, and I felt overjoyed because of the presence of God that I could feel in my normal, everyday life.
THIS is when I feel that I took ownership of my faith. Rather than just statements that I believed, I knew that God was true and was worth any bit of loneliness and suffering. I experienced Him in a way that I couldn’t have when I was 10.
But until training camp, I had been convicted about my testimony, feeling as if it wasn’t good enough, knowing that I couldn’t remember the change in me. And yet I pretended like I saw the change back when I was 10, so that people would see me the way they always have, as an almost perfect Christ follower from the beginning.
But on the last evening of training camp, after I had hidden my heart and my convictions like I always have, we were given the opportunity to get baptized. I don’t know how many people got baptized, but one by one, children of God went up to profess their faith in the presence of the body of believers gathered. At first, I was overjoyed to see new brothers and sisters as well as those recommitting their lives to Christ. But as the sun went down, and more time passed between each baptism, my heart began to ache. I began to feel convicted once again, and I began to panic at the thought of losing my chance to make that conviction right.
So I took off my shoes, walked toward the inflatable swimming pool that was leaking water out of the side due to overuse (yay!!) with Kaydan at my side. And my husband baptized me in front of my new family to declare to God and His beautiful bride that I believed in Him and was willing to follow all the days of my life, no matter what suffering would come my way for it.
Although salvation itself was not new to me, I felt the weight lifted as I was baptized, knowing I had now been baptized after taking full ownership of my faith in Christ.
Also, a crazy side note about being baptized…I had been struggling with this a lot of training camp and I only briefly talked to Kaydan about it once. So no one knew…but our amazing squad mentor, Megan, came up to me right after I got baptized. She hugged me and said that all night she had been picturing Kaydan and me and that she knew that one of us would baptize the other. How CRAZY is that!?! Crazy confirmation that added to my joy! God is SO good!
Thanks for reading, friends! I have left so much of training camp out of this blog, so if you would like to see what else went on— here is a video of our time at training camp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIjc2VOxQSE
