The last 10 days were incredible.
You must be ready to hike with your packs on your backs at 7am..and there went any hope I had of sleeping in for the week. Half an hour later we had breakfast, which kinda looked like poop with dried little fish. It was Asia day, so we had to eat with chopsticks, follow other cultural norms like bowing to each other and serving each other food. The brown stuff we ate was like chocolate flavored rice pudding but more starchy than rice pudding… the dried fish were well salty and crunchy and dry and thankfully the worst thing we ate all week. They tried to scare us. Other food themed days were Latin American, European, African and travel day…where we also practiced different cultural norms.
Teaching was intense. The first sesson was about living a life of unconcealed honesty…essentially just being real with one another. Real about our sins, our hurts, our pasts, our weaknesses, our pains….because we all have them and just creating an environment of love and acceptance for those things to be expressed. Its ok not to be ok. With honesty as our starting point we had to grieve our hurts, pains and losses, surrender whatever was holding us back from living as Christ’s empowered children…and through this I could see just how much hurt my team has already experienced and the amount of healing and change that took place exceeded what could happen through years of counseling. We’re all broken and messed up people, in need of God. It was a very humbling starting point.
Meeting other world racers was one of my favorite things about camp. Altogether there are 34 of us leaving in June, called the “I squad” we’re the 9th group to do this. Although I don’t know everyone as well as I would like, I am confident that God has put us all together- we’ve bonded in our brokenness and become one another’s cheerleaders. I am especially excited about my team, Azariah, which means God is help. Azariah will be my family in the upcoming year…and I love them …can’t really explain why but for me its a good fit and it will be cool to see how we grow and minister together!
back L to R: Kaleb, Scottie, Hailee, Leigh, Jonathan, front: Hannah and Damaris.
