Blogging about the World Race Training Camp is one of the hardest writing assignments I’ve face. How do I come up with the words for someone to accurately describe 10 days that wrecked my entire life? 10 days that pushed me in every way possible: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. 10 days I got to spend living in the woods with the most hilarious, loving, godly kids I’ve ever met. This wasn’t just training camp, it was 10 days of my life that my God taught me how to walk in freedom and live in joy and it was beautiful. But don’t be fooled. Training camp was the hardest 10 days of my life. It often left me exhausted, drained and above all else, hungry. I can honestly say that there was hardly ever enough food to be filled by, which is training for the smaller portion sizes other countries have especially third world countries, and even though my emotions were all over the place at any given moment, my hunger stayed pretty constant.
Hunger is a hard battle to fight when physically being pushed to your limits which happened nearly every day at training camp. Hiking with all of your gear, running, yoga, and paying for “visas” in workouts were many of our daily workouts that training camp put us through. Not to mention walking everywhere from the dinning tent, to the campsites, or to the training center. Plus, all of this physical activity took place outside in the Georgia heat, which means sweat. Sweat is something else you learn to live in at training camp. There is no escaping it or preventing it, and the only real time you can get away from it is when you hit the showers and take a lovely COLD bucket shower. Another thing I learned is that physical exhaustion quickly sets in when you aren’t getting enough sleep. Being in constant community did make it hard to sleep on multiple occasions when people would talk throughout the night while other were trying to sleep, and sleep is not something you get much of at training camp. However, one thing I learned is that if you are exhausted enough, you can sleep anywhere including in a tent, on the ground, in an airport, or in an ENO. Put all of this together and you get 10 days that are beyond physically draining that push you to grow in the spiritual discipline that is treating your body as the holy temple that it is.
Hunger is also not very fun when you are emotionally put through the ringer, which is one of the things training camp did best. Field scenarios can be very stressful and bring out the best or the worst emotions in people. One field exercise that brought out the best in me was one night where they drove us to a campground and dropped all 47 of us out in the woods with only food and tarp. What came of it was a night where a couple of my friends and I built the best tarp tent the world has ever seen, our squad swimming and watching the sunset at the lake, and worshiping our God around the campfire. Although the scenario sounded stressful at first, our squad came together to construct a night filled with community and fellowship. However, I came to realize that constant community can lead to high tension and stress. Even though I didn’t experience too much of that at training camp, all of us were pushed into hard emotional places through many of the wonderful speakers we had to learn from. Sessions took place through each day to teach us about faith, discipleship, grace, love, and forgiveness. All the speakers pushed us to confront what we hold in the dark and bring it out into the light. This means finally confessing our pasts, what hurts us, where we fell up short, and to give it to God. To have God break all of our chains so that we may learn to walk in the light.
Although I was pushed to my limits both physically and emotionally in those 10 days, I soared spiritually. Through being brought to my knees in worship, seeing Jesus in the eyes of all of my squad mates, and spending much time in the presence of my Savior, God exposed to me His joy and freedom in a way that I had never experienced before. It was in these moments that I learned how important it is to be hungry. The incredible thing hunger does to us is that when we finally are able to eat food, it taste that much sweeter and better. Also, when we are hungry we seek out a way to satisfy that hunger because hunger usually transforms into desire. For these reason, training camp taught me how I need to always stay spiritually hungry and seek God first in my life because He is the only one who can satisfy my true desires. Without knowing it, I went into training camp very spiritually hungry. God used this to satisfy me with unending freedom and joy to where I’ll never go back. I’ve turned to God in an understanding that He will fill the desires of my heart and provide for me in every way, and through that I no longer need to rely on anything of this world. Now that I have tasted of the grace and love of Jesus Christ, nothing else will ever taste as good. I crave His word and His truth in a way that makes me seek Him out in everything because I am staying spiritually hungry for more and more of my God. Lastly, I learned that God is sooooo good. He is soooooo good. He is a good good father, and I hope that you to stay spiritually hungry for more and more of Him because He is the only ONE who can fill the desires of your heart. And once you taste of the grace of Jesus, you too will never go back.
