Today marks two weeks of training camp, and my brain feels quite scattered, so bear with me while I try to organize everything for you all. 😅
Note: If you’re reading this on your phone, the formatting looks way better if you turn your phone sideways…
Friends!
I’m sure this is no surprise to any of you, but I’m not really into hype and big groups of people and meeting a whole bunch of people in a day. My parents and I showed up on day one, and we pulled into the driveway greeted by people yelling and cheering and blowing airhorns. I was like, “Oh boy. This could be interesting.” And it certainly has been. After registering, I was taken to M-squad’s communal campsite. After a bit of somewhat awkward socializing, we were allowed to start setting up our tents. That’s when I met my first friend! Gabi had already set up her tent, so she helped me set up mine. She and I have hung out a good bit since then. I’ve also connected with a few other people from my squad, but most people I’ve only talked to a couple of times. That’s kinda my style, though. I’m not probably going to be super close to everybody at any point in time on this trip, and that’s okay. It’s just kinda hard for me because the few people I’m trying to be close to, I have to start from the ground up. That’s hard.
Who needs a schedule, anyways?
I’ll give you a hint. I do. And fortunately, we are provided with a schedule that we follow loosely. I came into this knowing that it was going to be an opportunity to give up control, and it certainly has been that, and my lack of control is only going to increase as we start heading to the mission field. We still do not have information about what country we will be going to third because Adventures in Missions doesn’t know yet. I’m kind of in the boat where I’m not super worried about it. We will be somewhere, but right now we are here and I have enough to process just from training camp.
Wrestling with God
The spiritual aspect of training camp has been quite a ride. To be fair, I did have some idea before I got here that my experience would not be the same as my church experience thus far. That has certainly been proven true. I will clarify that when I say “wrestling with God,” I really do mean with, not against. I’m bringing things back to the Bible and asking God for answers because I don’t believe in just blindly following what the leaders are saying just because they are leaders.
Sessions
My first instinct was to shut down and just ignore the teachings, primarily because they use a lot of testimonies and personal experience as opposed to starting from a Bible passage and going from there. The content of the teaching is also a bit strange to me in that a lot of it is giving tools versus more specific teaching. The first teaching was on “What is the gospel?” and it honestly took a while for the gospel to be presented at all. Once they got to using the Bible, the passage used was Titus 3:4-7.
But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
They focused on the three-pronged gospel, which says that the gospel leads to power, forgiveness, and adoption. That’s fine and all, but repentance from sin and Jesus death were brushed over, if they were mentioned at all. I don’t know how you can have a teaching on the gospel and talk so little about what Jesus did and why we need Him. They did circle back and present the gospel more effectively in their teaching on evangelism, so that was good.
I do think that the Bible content has gotten better in recent sessions. For example, the teaching on the missional heart of God was packed with scripture after scripture, including a lot from the Old Testament. It was really good to see God’s heart for the nations even from the covenant with Abraham. If you don’t have much context on the Abrahamic covenant, I will summarize! Basically, the custom at the time was for two people to make a formal agreement by cutting some animals in half and then walking between the two halves, essentially agreeing that if they broke their side of the deal, the other person could do to them what they had done to the animals. So God had Abraham cut some animals in half, but when it came time for them to walk between the two sides, God put Abraham to sleep and went through the two sides alone in the form of a smoking oven and a burning torch (Read Genesis 15 for the unabridged version). Essentially, God was agreeing to take the penalty if He broke His side of the covenant, and to pay the penalty if Abraham/Israel broke his/their side of the covenant. And isn’t that just what Jesus did on the cross? We broke our side of the covenant, so Jesus spilled His blood because that’s what God committed to do on our behalf when he went between those animals. That’s kind of wild. Isn’t God so good?
Worship
The worship style has been very repetitive, expressive, and fluid as opposed to the more structured songs I grew up with. I had never seen people dancing or kneeling or praying over other people in worship before, and to be completely honest, it was a little off-putting at first. I’m still far from the most expressive person in the room, but once I got over feeling like I had to match the energy, it was at least a little freeing to not feel weird for raising a hand or swaying or whatever.
Hearing God’s Voice
I grew up being taught, whether explicitly or implicitly through ignoring the issue, that God doesn’t really talk to His people right now like He did in the Bible because we already have everything we need in the Bible. The role of the Holy Spirit was presented as being just for conviction, sanctification, and sealing us as God’s children. We never really talked about the gifts of prophesy or speaking in tongues or hearing God speak audibly. We were supposed to be led by the Holy Spirit, but I never really understood what that meant. Spoiler alert: I still don’t.
At training camp we have been taught to talk to God and to listen for His response. We were told that sometimes God speaks audibly, sometimes we “hear” Him in our spirit, and sometimes we just know by intuition what He wants us to do. In addition, both leadership and other racers share images that they believe God gives them as visions somewhat frequently. With my background, I was somewhat skeptical of all of this “hearing from God.” Not that I didn’t believe that people had those experiences, but that I couldn’t be sure that it was from God. Honestly, in their instructions on how to listen for God’s voice, they’ve been pretty clear that not everything we think is from God is, and we have to filter those things through the Bible, other believers, what we know of God’s character, etc. They also made it clear that it’s a practice, and we’re not going to get it right every time. I think there’s some wisdom to that. When I took all of this back to the Word, looking for evidence that God doesn’t work that way anymore, I found no reason to believe that, so I’m kind of hesitantly dipping my toes in the water. I’m honestly not sure what to expect here, but I’m not really afraid anymore because I trust God and I have the Bible to check things against. The Bible is always going to be my final authority, so I can be content whether or not God chooses to speak to me in a more tangible way than He has before. I’m really trying not to put God in a box in an unhealthy way, but I also am not going to just follow everything that feels like it could be God. So yeah. That’s kind of where I’m at. If you disagree with my position, please reach out! I would love to hear your insights.
God speaks!
Yesterday my squad had the opportunity to go to Kroger and evangelize. I have never gone out evangelizing to strangers before, so it was definitely a little nerve wracking. I was partnered with one other girl from my squad. We just kinda walked around and talked to a couple people and prayed for them. I left a little discouraged because we prayed for some people, but we didn’t really actually get into the gospel with anyone. To be fair, we were in the Bible Belt, so half the people we talked to already claim Jesus as their Savior.
So anyway, we didn’t really get to the gospel, and I was feeling a little bit discouraged that I wasn’t good enough at talking to people to lead the conversation to that point. It seems like since people’s eternities are at stake, I would have at least asked one person if they wanted to hear about what Jesus did for them, but I didn’t. I felt like I just wasn’t a good enough communicator and I was incapable of talking to people well enough to share the gospel at all, much less in a convincing way.
Then I opened my Bible where I left off, and what do you know?!? The passage I was reading was Exodus chapter 4. Moses is talking to God through the burning bush, and he’s putting up a fight because God wants him to go back to Egypt to lead the people into freedom, and he doesn’t feel qualified. I’ll share an excerpt…
“Then Moses said to the Lord, “Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” The Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes him mute or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say.”“ (Exodus 4:10-12)
I don’t really feel like that needs a lot of explanation. I don’t need to be worrying about how good my communication skills are. I need to be faithful to bring what God has given me to the table, and He’ll do the work to teach me to share who He is more effectively and to fill in the gaps for people where I fail.
And that wasn’t even the end of it! Today I had the opportunity to lead M squad’s morning devotional. I had a passage chosen to focus on (Isaiah 30) and some explanation of what was going on and why it still applies to us and then I also prepared application questions for people to work through on their own. Afterwards, one of my squad mates literally walked up and said to me, “You’re very well spoken.” I’m sorry, what?!? I’m walking around worrying that God can’t use me because I can’t communicate well enough, and God tells me loud and clear through His Word and through people around me that that’s just not true. It’s wasn’t a vision or audibly hearing the voice of God, but God definitely got his message across.
Bye for now!
There’s honestly so much to share, but I can’t just type all day, so I’m going to stop there for now. If you guys want to hear any more about Isaiah 30, let me know. Or just read it; it’s really good. Use the comments section! I love to hear from you guys! I said it before and I’ll say it again: don’t be afraid to disagree. A lot of this is new to me, so if you have insights, share them!
Almost forgot prayer requests…
- Pray for team bonding and overall unity of the squad.
- Pray for me to process well and to find the truth about all the things I’m wrestling with God about.
- A lot of my squad mates are sick, so pray that they will recover quickly and also that I will not get sick. I really do not want to get sick.
- Pray that I would grow in confidence in building up my squad mates through encouragement and constructive criticism.
- Pray that I would grow in my ability and willingness to share the gospel.
- We started sharing testimonies in our teams (Teams are subdivisions of the squad. Mine is our leader Ava and 8 other girls from my squad.), so pray that I would have wisdom and courage to share my story in the way that most glorifies God.
Thanks again for all your prayers!
Karis
