I’ve spent the past couple days trying to gather my thoughts about camp and it’s a lot to take in. I did my fair share of pouring through blogs by other racers to glean anything I could to help prepare myself. I knew it would be a week of stretching, smelliness, and strange foods. However with each blog some key elements eluded me. Now having gone through it my own experience I can now see why everything was always so secretive. For one thing they do it to help break you of expectations. Second, no two camps are alike. Us for instance, were graced with a lot of rain and chilly weather. It was like I never left Ohio. However that did no dampen (pun intended) the amount of love and compradore throughout our squad. I freaking love my group. So many hugs and amazing smiles. Before I get into too much detail, allow me to spare you the scrolling if you just want some short cut answers (I’m speaking to you future racer):
1. Embrace the stank.
2. Embrace the suck (Which can come in many forms. Lost bags, bucket showers in 50 degrees, exhaustion, etc.).
3. Embrace the embrace (Hugs. You will get a lot. Enjoy them.)
4. Embrace everything.
Now if you want some truly useful information then I implore you to read on. I’d like to say I had some profound revelation or God gave me some great word, but he didn’t. Instead I tapped into something much deeper. Confirmation and a sense of certainty. I came to camp just expecting God to show up when and how he pleased, and he indeed helped me realize some things about myself and him. I was tired and having stomach issues, but I never felt more alive. I was sore and smelly, but never felt more solid. My soul was at ease and my heart just knew I was in the right place in my walk. During worship (which is freaking incredible) I just stayed quiet for the most part. No singing. Eyes closed. Heart focused like it was just me and Jesus in the room. He gave me gentle words of reassurance that he was taking care of some loose ends. I didn’t have to worry. All I had to do was keep laying down some things, and prepare my heart to let go of even more. A very good question was posed to us: what 11 things are you willing to leave behind? The challenge is to have something that represents each of those 11 things and symbolically leave it behind each time we move to another country. I don’t have my full list yet, but I have 2 months to figure that out and let God bring it to the surface of my heart.
If you would like to know some interesting things that happened to me at camp here’s one, myself and 2 others were given the task to lead the whole squad through a mock market scenario to get food for all 53 people. Complete with yelling, shoving, pick-pockets, homeless, blind, crazy traffic, and a slew of other things. We had a bunch of fake money, little to no explanation of the currency rate, and 15 minutes to figure out how to explain it to our squad. Awesome. Between the 3 of us we managed to figure out some sort of plan and in the end we all made out like bandits with extra food and money to spare. Everyone did a great job despite a couple shoes and water bottle getting snatched. Don’t worry they showed up in lost and found eventually.
Another fun one was team day! The day we finally found out our teams which is probably the biggest stressor. Ours is called Ransom, and our team leader Bethany had a vision of God viewing our team like a female warrior on a horse with a bow and arrow ready to charge into battle, but patient and steady in waiting for orders. It honestly fits incredibly well. We have some pretty bold and quirky personalities. Once our teams were announced we had a few hours to hang out and our task was to make a memory. Ours entailed a glorious shower at the YMCA, followed by stuffing our faces at Chick-fil-a, and getting a piercing! Yup that’s right. I got my nose done. We would’ve gotten tattoos but some other teams beat us to the punch. In all seriousness though I love my group of girls I will be serving with, and I know God will use us mightily to protect the broken and lost. We’re a warrior group.
Now about the scorpion lol. There’s a few buildings around the area we were camped and a bunch of us were going to one for a workshop. Before going in however we had to take off our shoes, and just before I was about to kick off my Chacos I noticed something by the door that i thought was a spider, only it was too skinny. Upon closer inspection I noticed it was a scorpion, but it wasn’t moving. So, being the genius I am I nudged it with my foot thinking it was dead. Nope. It started moving around and perk up. Fearing for the numerous empty shoes lying about I took it upon myself to grind it into the cement. Problem solved. The end.
