Hey everyone! It’s been three weeks since training camp, and I finally got back home to Boston last Sunday. As I have been settling back into my regular life, I have been processing and trying to figure out the best way to capture my experience at training camp in a blog post. I am not sure I have got it all sorted out yet, but I am going to try and write about it anyway.
First, you all are probably wondering about my squad. They are the most amazing group of people, and I am so excited to spend the next nine months with them. If there was one word I would use to describe them it would be “selfless”. I was blown away by how willing everyone was to sacrifice comforts for one another. From food to tents, nothing was too big or too small to share. My squad always made sure that everyone was taken care of, and from then on I knew that I wanted these people by my side for this journey.
I was also assigned to my team. I am so blessed to get to work alongside five of the most amazing women I have ever met. Each of them has such a passion for helping others, and I am so excited to see them in action. We get to spend the first three weeks of our time in Guatemala in Antigua with the rest of our squad, and then my team is going to Guatemala City
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Team United Pursuit!
Of all the life lessons I learned at training camp, three stand out the most. The first is a lesson that I have been spending my whole life learning: that I have no real control over my future. This is something that moving around has taught me. Over the years, I have had to learn to trust God with my future because I would have no idea what my next few months would look like. Training camp brought this to a whole new level for me. At training camp, I would not know what I was doing the next hour, let alone the next day, and it was great. I learned that, when I’m not focusing on what’s next, I am able to focus in on the present moment. It confirmed the lesson that God has been trying to teach me my whole life. I can not only choose happiness in uncertainty, but I can thrive in it, because my God is a provider and he is big enough to hold my future in his hands.
The second lesson I learned was about abandonment. Not being abandoned, but me giving up everything to follow Christ. Jesus called his disciples to give up everything: possessions, friends, security, family. Somehow, I had lost sight of that in my life. I think that I spent so much time preparing for my mission trip, that I had forgotten why I was going. I am going because God has called me to abandon everything and follow him. So I am going to spend nine months showing his love to people around the world, with only a small pack on my back. I am going to leave pieces of myself, parts of my identity, behind with the things I abandon, like my home, belongings, friends, and family. I will have to find my identity in Christ, rather than the things around me. Understanding this has given me new strength and motivation for this trip, and I am so excited to see what will happen in my life during these next nine months.
Finally, the most important lesson I learned is probably the most simple. I am a child of God. I have heard that my whole life, and yet I never fully understood what it meant. I have lived out my life trying to be perfect enough to be in God’s presence. I had the mindset that if I did the right things, like read my Bible and pray constantly, that I could become closer to God. The emphasis was on me and what I did to earn God’s love. However, I didn’t see it as trying to be “good enough”, I simply saw it as being a “good christian”. Everybody knows that, to be a better Christian, you need to read your Bible and pray more. I had heard that my whole life, and so I would get frustrated when I thought I did all the right things, and yet felt so far from God. I saw myself as a sinner, constantly asking God for forgiveness so that I could be near him. At training camp, one simple sentence changed all of that. The speaker said, “Since the moment you accepted Jesus as your savior, God has never seen you as a sinner.”
That idea is so simple, and yet so powerful. I had been living my life without fully accepting the power of Jesus’s blood to cover my sins. From the moment I said yes to Christ’s mercy, God no longer saw me as a sinner. He sees me as his daughter, he loves me, and he thinks I am worth dying for. I am not a “sinner saved by grace”, because I am no longer a sinner. I am a child of God. He sees me as perfect. He sees me like he sees Jesus. I don’t have to try to do all the right things to live in the presence of God. He wants to be near to me, just as I want to be near to him. I don’t have to work to get there, I simply need to accept his love and his mercy. I don’t need to run to him, I can stand where I am and he will come to me.
This doesn’t mean that doing good things isn’t important, I still read my Bible and pray. However, it is no longer an obligation for me. It is something I do because I want to. I want to talk to my father every chance I get. Also, my internal dialogue has changed. Whenever something happens I can say to myself “I am a child of God. He calls me his daughter. He sees me as perfect. He doesn’t see me as a sinner.” It is much easier to think better of myself and other people now. God doesn’t see me as a sinner, so I don’t see other people as sinners anymore, and nothing anyone else says can change the way God sees me.
I will still mess up, but that is alright. I can trust that Christ’s blood is powerful enough to cover that. The important thing is that my sin no longer defines me, God’s love for me does. I am so excited to show this truth to people around the world. Now, I am free to live my life to the fullest because I am not hampered by fear. I can walk confidently in the truth that I am a child of God.
Those are the biggest lessons I learned from training camp. I learned so much in just ten short days, and I can’t wait to see what I’ll learn over the next nine months. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post. If you have any questions at all feel free to contact me!
Picture of my squad’s campsite at night
