“So I can joyfully say that I WILL be going to Atlanta for training to meet my squad and get wrecked by the Holy Spirit in preparation for this trip! I have read so many blogs from people who recently finished training and am so excited for and looking forward to writing about my own Training Camp Experience!”
(June 17, 2012; Fundraising, Life and Equipment Update)
Here I am, one month later, home from my own training camp. All the blogs I read were true, but Training Camp was also SO MUCH MORE. Honestly, you could read all the blogs you can find, talk to someone who has already gone through it and still go to training camp and be completely blown away. I could tell you every single thing we did at training camp and it would not NEARLY prepare you for what this one week has in store!
I didn’t know much of anything going into training camp. I had no expectations, except that I would get wrecked by the Spirit. The beginning of the week was a series of talks about various topics, all VERY pertinent to preparing your heart for missions. Each session, there were powerful things going down in that chapel. People were learning what it meant and how necessary it is to grieve, people were getting set free from lies they had believed, PEOPLE WERE GETTING HEALED- physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
The presence of the Lord was so thick you could feel it, and it was much more refreshing than the thick Georgia humidity that we couldn’t escape all week. Talk after talk, I kept thinking that they were such good talks, but were not for me in this current season. I still took pages and pages of notes [for future reference] and knew that I would eventually need to hear these words again. God was moving and I was just enjoying basking in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Worship was AWESOME [too awesome for words to fully convey…]!
Just when I thought I was going to get out of the week without getting “wrecked,” thinking that God was just proving to me that even expectations that sound “Godly” could be shattered by the work of the Spirit, I got this feeling that I was on the sidelines of something great. My prayer had become similar to my prayer in college ball: “I’m here, I’m ready! Tag me in coach!!” I was witnessing this stellar soccer match [bear with me with the soccer references :)] and I so wanted to be a part of it, but there was something holding me back.
I had no idea what it was, but I knew it was there. This happened on Thursday night: not a night of “extravagant” worship, not a night of convicting teaching, just a simple acoustic worship set. And for the first time in my life, I COULDN’T SING in worship. On this last night of sessions, GOD WAS WRECKING ME.
He taught me how to sit and “be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). He taught me that I AM NOT IN CONTROL. Sometimes I can do nothing to help my situation. Sometimes I just have to sit and be with my Jesus and trust that He knows the plans He has for me; plans to prosper me, and not to harm me; plans to give me hope and a future [Jeremiah 29:11].
But the next day, when we were praying over our sister/squad mate, our prayers quickly turned to praises. And those praises were the sweetest I have ever experienced.
“weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.” – Psalm 30:5
And I leave you with this video made by my squadmate, Jen. It is a great summary, yet it only scratches the surface of what happened during this long, exhausting week. Grace and peace.
