10 days. That’s all it took for an incredible bond to form between W squad.
How do I sum up training camp when I’m not even sure what happened myself?
I could tell you stories of our sleeping arrangements, the different cultural foods we ate, the various forms of showering, the bugs that became our friends, worship sessions, team activities and the team formation process. Instead, I choose to share with you one specific story that I feel depicts a good picture of what I experienced during camp overall and what lies ahead.
Second to last day of camp we had squad wars (5 different squads competing in various challenges). For this, my squad chose 3 people to be swimmers as part of the swimming/running challenge. No one was particularly excited about this challenge, so I volunteered. How bad could it be, right? You get in the water, do a couple strokes, probably sprint a little somewhere. “I got this,” I thought to myself. Little did I know what I was getting myself into!
We had to swim to a buoy and back, run across the beach and back up a decent flight of stairs. For any of you swimmers this would be a piece of cake, but I’ve never done this kind of intense physical activity. I honestly didn’t even realize swimming was that intense until getting halfway to the buoy when my arms were killing me, and I was so out of breath. My two squad mates encouraged me to take a breather at the buoy. The fight and the struggle swimming back was overbearing and too real. I eventually went on my back into floating position and did backwards strokes-whatever I could do to keep moving. All of a sudden I heard my name and my two squad mates pulled me in the rest of the way.
I don’t remember the last time my body was in that much physical pain. My legs were on fire, I got super lightheaded, but despite hating the challenge itself and getting sick afterwards, I don’t regret volunteering for this because…
I got to experience JESUS and COMMUNITY through it.
My squad mates were the ultimate picture of Jesus here, and I LOVE that it came out in some silly squad war challenge. These guys were always ahead of me, but kept looking back to see where I was and never left me hangin. They were intentional about doing this together as a team and stayed with me the whole time. They encouraged me, told me to rest when I needed to rest, and helped stir up confidence in me when it was time to press on. When I was too weak to finish, they carried me. When I got sick, a squad mate stood right beside me rubbing my back.
Any of this sounding like someone familiar?? Replace “they” with Jesus’ name in that paragraph. Not only did I get to experience the love of Christ through this whole swimming challenge, I got to experience the love of my squad mates because they were being Jesus, whether they realized it or not.
Isn’t that the whole point of this mission trip? To BE Jesus to others? I was so beautifully (and painfully) reminded of that.
Although this is only one story out of MANY I could share with you, I chose it because I felt it represented our whole time together as a squad. We were Jesus to each other this week, and I can’t wait to be Jesus all around the world with such amazing friends!
