Have I said before that Training Camp was hard? If you’re tuning in for the first time, it was. I’ve mentioned before that it was physically and emotionally challenging, but you can bet it was spiritually challenging too – that was the intent from the beginning.
We sat through a lot of seminars/sessions during the first few days, in which I was hit by a barrage of ideas, information, and terminology I was completely unfamiliar with. There was a lot of talk about the Holy Spirit, and it turns out that’s a subject I don’t know much about. I felt like I didn’t fit in, like I wasn’t “spiritual enough” for the race, and worst of all, I felt completely separated from God. I was surrounded by people, and yet I felt alone, abandoned by the one who has promised never to.
It got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, and I voiced my concerns to a squad leader and a squad trainer after a particularly difficult session. While they assured me it was okay to feel the way I was feeling, they said I needed to go off by myself for a little while to reflect, journal, and spend some time with God. That wasn’t as easy as it usually is, considering I felt like there was some gigantic, supernatural barrier keeping me away from God, so I walked down the path into the woods, and yelled out. “Where are you?!”
I was angry, I was frustrated, and I was scared. For the entirety of training camp I had been hearing these stories and testimonies of people who had had these unbelievable encounters with God, who had been healed from impossible things, who had been given the right words at the right time to say to someone in need… the list goes on. So where was my encounter? Did everyone have the Holy Spirit but me? Had I just been skipped?
I picked up my bible and thought, “Here’s a perfect opportunity, God. Show me something here.” Then I closed my eyes opened the bible to a random page, and looked at where it opened. What did I find? Psalm 13.
1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5 But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me
I won’t pretend that this wasn’t relevant to my situation… and I tried to cast it off as nothing. The Psalms are a long book and they’re right in the middle of the bible – if you open it up randomly, there’s a good chance you’re getting a Psalm. But this was just too good, too perfect, too well-timed to just be a coincidence, so that was something to think about.
Later that day I had to talk to a few of the AIM staff members about some things they had observed about me. I’m not going to get into the details, but our conversation uncovered some things about myself I hadn’t realized. Things I had never properly addressed and were having a pretty negative impact on my overall well-being. (I promise I’m not going out of my way to be cryptic, but I’m trying to give as much context as possible without going too far.) The one really important fact about myself that revealed itself during this little session: I never feel like I am enough, for myself or for others. I compare myself to others and set standards so high that I could never reach them, which sets me up for disappointment. This certainly wasn’t the only thing we discussed, but there’s way more to this that I won’t elaborate on just yet.
I don’t remember all that much about the rest of that day. There were a few more sessions and “wisdom talks” from alumi racers, but that’s about all I can recall. Until that night, when all of the squads would come to the training center for worship, which I wasn’t really looking forward to.
I’m usually not too fond of “worship choruses” – taking one or two lines and singing them over and over. To be fair, I grew up Presbyterian, where hymns and contemporary worship are generally in separate services, and even contemporary worship is a lot simpler than in other churches. I love both the traditional and the modern, and now I go to an Assemblies of God church where it’s all worship team all the time, but at the training camp worship sessions I was completely out of my comfort zone. We sang a lot of these choruses and to me, they lasted far too long, to the point where I was starting to get annoyed with the whole thing.
The other factor in this is that I value words over music 95% of the time. When I repeat something too many times, it loses its significance and just becomes noise to me. This may not be true for others, dare I say the majority of the Racers at camp, but it wasn’t for me. As a music student, I had learned early on that there is no repetition for the sake of repetition. If you’re saying/singing/playing something again, there had better be a good reason, and you had better pay attention.
It turns out I didn’t need to leave the country at all to get some major culture shock. When everyone was raising their arms and jumping up and down during these long, long songs, I was just standing and singing. I’m no hand-raiser – if I take them out of my pockets during worship, that’s as free as I get.
So that night I didn’t expect worship to be any different for me, especially since I had spoken to the AIM staff about all of those complicated things I mentioned previously. But I was feeling a little better since that afternoon, so I decided to shake things up a little bit and sit near the front. That’s very unlike me, especially in uncomfortable and/or loud situations. It’s no secret that short girl + back row = easy to blend in and stay unnoticed.
But I went for the second row this time, the first indication something might be different that night. And then the worship band, made up of alumni Racers, started to play. It didn’t matter that we’d been singing these same songs for days – every word, every repeated line became new, no matter how many times we went over them. For the first time all week, every time I opened my mouth, I could believe every word. Repetition no longer led to insignificance, and I could hear and see something new and amazing each time.
It got more interesting. Like I said, I am not a hand-raiser, but that night it was like gravity had relinquished its grip on my arms, and I couldn’t keep them down. My reserved, self-conscious persona was taking a backseat for this new, free individual who wanted to worship without a care in the world.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder, it did. (Of course). Suddenly, as was singing with my hands lifted high, tears came out of nowhere, streaming down my face, and they would not stop for pretty much the entire time I was in the room. I let them fall and continued to sing, and somehow, in that moment, I knew I stood in the presence of God. I have no crazy, unbelievable story about hearing the audible voice of God or seeing the face of Jesus or being miraculously healed, but this was my encounter that I had been yearning for: this outpouring of love, grace, and acceptance raining down on me that I had never felt before. I finally understood what John Mark McMillan was singing about when he said “loves like a hurricane, I am a tree. Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.”
Earlier that day, we had talked about “staying in the river,” with the “river” being God’s presence. During that session I felt so far away that I couldn’t even see the river anymore, and it wasn’t a good feeling. But now I was there, and I never wanted to leave. I could lift my pain, my insecurity, and my anxiety to God again as the whole room sang and worshipped together.
“Take me out to the middle of the river, I want to drown in the good ol’ river of your love…”
I realized that my frustration, my distance, my feelings of being spiritually dead in the previous 48 hours had served a purpose.
“I want to ride on the river, ride on the river of your love…”
That God had been silent in those two excruciating days in order to strip me down to my core, to uncover things I had tried to hide, to let me feel like there was a wall between us, so he could reveal himself to me and show me truths I could only receive if it was all I had left. To overwhelm me with his love in a way I could not ignore. To rebuild me from my most broken.
“I want to get lost in the river, lost in the river of your love…”
I had these revelations come to me, as if they were spoken by God himself. Such simple things, but ones I needed to be reminded of.
“It doesn’t matter that you do not feel like you’re enough for your family/school/friends/the race, because you are enough for me.”
“You actually have it backwards: you do not need to be “enough for me,” because I am enough for you.”
“You do not need to be ashamed of who you are, because I created you.”
And finally, and most importantly:
“It does not matter when you don’t feel loved, because I love you.”
“I’ve been baptized by the river, baptized by the river of your love…”
Was this the Holy Spirit? This third piece of the trinity that I just couldn’t wrap my mind around? I think it was.
“I’ve been healed by the river, healed by the river of your love…”
