Part two
Outside of all the incredible friendships I made at training camp, I got to see incredible works of God too. This blog post could go on for pages and pages if I talked about all the sick things Jesus did, but I’ll cut that down for your sake and mine.
Every night we were given the opportunity to all gather together and worship. And let me tell you, my home church Bridgetown has an incredible worship team and I get chills every week, but the worship at training camp was the screaming as loud as you can, falling to your knees and jumping up and down kind of worship.
shake up your soul kind of worship
It was mindblowing to me just how cool it was that we got the chance to do this every night. I got to the point of literally praying to God asking Him to give me a little bit more of my voice so I could keep singing, this was of course after I had already lost it and was sounding like a 13-year-old boy by day two.
With this kind of worship comes great miracles and blessings.
One of these blessings being that he did give me a little of my voice back so I could keep singing and proclaiming His love, but He did much more than just grant me some more time to sing.
You always hear stories about how God healed the sick, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, all that good stuff. He proved over and over again that He would provide living hope to those who ask all in His own time. It’s rare that you actually get to see these kinds of stories happen in real life, right before your very eyes. Not necessarily because God doesn’t want to answer your prayers right in front you at that exact moment, but more because God’s timing has proven time and time again to be much better than our timing, and most of the time, ours does not line up with His. But training camp was a different story. As a group of people, racers, team leaders, mentors, advisors, the whole shebang we came together to pray for those who needed it, those who had chronic illnesses or earthly pain they couldn’t heal themselves. We prayed over these people, asking for healing and joy to be brought to them, and after worships and prayers, people were asked to go on stage to share if they had been healed. And first off, huge shoutout to these people for being bold enough to share these stories. Second off, there was a moment after asking these people to come up, where nobody moved, the room stood still and doubt crept in.
Did it not work? Is God not listening? Does He not care?
And before we could even finish questioning, one person stood up in tears, and then another and another, and quickly there was a line on the stage of all these people crying with the biggest smiles on their faces. And one by one they shared what they had been struggling with and how for the first time in sometimes years that they felt peace and joy again for the first time.
These were kids my age, an 18-year-old girl who had struggled with knee pain since a freshman year sports injury finally feeling no pain. A 20-year-old boy who had struggled self-love, feeling like he was truly worthy of God’s time. It was a boy with a broken arm being able to move his fingers again for the first time since the accident. Small acts of big love from the Father.
It’s hard to believe this when it’s not you, or you weren’t there and you’re reading this through a computer or phone screen, but I guess ill have to ask you to take it from me.
Praises make blessings. Proclaiming Him on the mountains and looking to Him in the valleys is how we should be living our lives every day. When we do this has people of God he listenings and provides for us, and even though I wasn’t the one being healed, I was blessed enough to see the people around me feel God physically fix what had been going wrong, and that is incredible to see. And now I get to be the one telling people these crazy stories of healing.
With love
SJ
