Training camp.
10 days in northern Georgia preparing to spend nine months traveling throughout the nations.
10 days facing some of the hardest challenges I’ve ever had to face, preparing to face even harder challenges for nine months straight.
10 days of getting to know my new family, my new church.
10 days of intimacy with God on a level I didn’t even know existed.
10 days of greatness, even amidst the challenges.
Nearly a week ago I returned from training camp. So much happened in those 10 days, spiritually, physically, and mentally. It has taken me almost a week to feel as if I have processed the information enough to share it, but honestly I could never do those 10 days justice.
Every day we had three sessions that were each meant to teach us about something that would help us be more successful on the field. The sessions were all modeled around Missional Living, Intimacy with God, and Community. Three sessions a day, for 10 days, on extremely important subjects is enough to make anyone’s mind explode, and I’m pretty sure mine did. But the lessons I learned will be taken with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life.
The speakers brought new concepts to missional living that, even in my six or seven years of constantly learning about missional living, I had never heard before. The Intimacy with God sessions taught me how to grow closer to my God daily and dig deeper into a relationship with Him so that I may better understand and hear the Holy Spirit. The Community sessions taught me how to do life with my squad and my teammates for the next nine months, and what a church on mission for God looks like. But learning all of that amazing and mind blowing information wasn’t even the best part.
After observing my generation praise the King all day long for 10 days straight, I have a renewed hope. Many believe that my generation is leaving the church, but the truth of the matter is, until you venture out and observe more of us in action you can never really be sure. For 10 days I saw 272 people between the ages of 18 and 22 daily praising the Lord with so much passion you could feel the Holy Spirit no matter where you went. Praise and worship so beautiful people would be brought to their knees moments after the music started. New families created because of such a strong and common desire and need to go into the nations and preach the Gospel to the least of these. The feeling was, is, indescribable. Unity through Christ and a common desire to serve Him turned our squad of 55 strangers into not only a family, but one of the strongest and most unified churches I have ever been a part of. I can, with certainty, say that I will never believe that my generation is leaving the church. In fact, I believe whole-heartedly that my generation of believers will be a generation of World Changers like this world has never seen before. We are an army rising up, an army of World Changers who fight in and for the great name of the Lord Most High.
10 days of eating crazy foods, sleeping in tents in the hot Georgia summer, using port-a potties, and taking bucket showers (literally a bucket filled with hose water in a shower stall outdoors) prepared me for the physical challenges I may face on my mission trip.
10 days of sermons on the Holy Spirit, sessions about anything and everything to do with living on missions, and worship like I’ve never experienced before showed me the potential for how amazingly beautiful nine months on the field can, and hopefully will, be.
10 days spend worshiping and praising God opened my eyes to what a generation of World Changers truly looks like, and gave me a new hope for beautiful and amazing things to come in the next year.
I haven’t even officially started the Race yet and I’ve already felt God in ways I never have before.
I can’t wait to see what He has for me next.
