My eyes were wide and I was quiet when I got home. My parents welcomed me back with hugs, vegetables, and flowers, but also gave me space to take a shower or sleep. They could tell I was a bit overwhelmed. I started telling them about training camp with short, didactic sentences, because that was all I could manage for a while. “We ate strange food. Not too bad” — “It was really tough” —“Love my squadmates”. After enough of these choppy sentences, I think I finally started to make sense.
Training camp was tough. I came into the experience purposefully ignorant and willing to grow. I wanted to put my full self into the training and be uncomfortable where I needed to be. Happily, the leadership at Adventures in Missions cares much more about my growth and maturity than my comfort, and so our partnership worked well.
I explained it to my parents this way: it was like there were two different full curricula going on simultaneously. The first included cultural lessons, the stripping away of creature comforts, and an onslaught of physically demanding challenges. These quickly brought us to a place of weakness where we had to lean on God’s strength and on our squad mates. Our demanding background/landscape for the ten days purposefully sling-shotted our comfort zones 15 miles away; this was the first curriculum. The second was rigorous training in three main areas: (1) individual spiritual and emotional health, (2) communication and cooperation in community living, and (3) discipleship in the context of short-term missions. I appreciated that both our brains and hearts were taught, and that we were given many opportunities to communicate with god, with our leaders, and with our peers about our responses to the teachings. I’ve never heard the words “process” and “debrief” used so many times, and I was thankful for it. (I.e.—“I’m still processing” // “How are you processing that?”)
The ten days at training camp helped me immensely. I feel like I am less in denial about the fact that, yes, I am actually doing this thing. I was given permission to be weak and to be strong; to be hopeful and to be nervous; to be confident and to be fully dependent on God. Now more than ever, I sense the longing in my heart to know God more closely and to look like Jesus more purposefully. I fell in love with my squadmates and am so looking forward to growing together. Training camp put a proper urgency within me: It’s okay for me to be uncomfortable in this most important lesson of life.
“Whoever claims to abide in God ought to walk in just the way Jesus did”
1 John 2:6
