Hey guys,
So, as of today, I have officially completed training camp at World Race and am now currently in Thailand. Before I share about my time in Thailand (which I will do in a later post), I want to give a recap of my first 2 weeks at World Race at training camp, starting with how things were formatted, what I did at World Race, and what were my big takeaways/ lessons learned.
For training camp, I was in Gainsville, Georgia, which is the headquarters of the mission organization Adventures in Missions, which World Race is a part of. During this training, I was introduced to the immersive experience of living in community. During my time there, there was about 60 of us, who were all being trained to be sent to various places. One thing to note about this training is that it was for 4 different squads, going to different locations for different lengths of time. A “squad” in World Race is a word used for a group of people signing up for a particular trip. For my trip, which is called World Race Expedition, there was 16 people who signed up, and we were given the title S Squad. My trip will be about 10 months of me going to Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. While as a squad the 16 of us will be going to these countries together, we will typically be split into 3 teams of 5-7 people, to work in 3 different locations while in each of the countries.
With that background given, now as to what I did at training/ what a typical day looked like. So my entire time at training camp, we all slept in a big open room inside on the ground, with a rolling divider separating the girls and guys. Each day, we woke up here and had to pack up our stuff from this space to be placed in a smaller room, as this big space was used as part of the training locations. After waking up, we had devotions followed by breakfast. After this, each day varied but generally consisted of teachings, scenarios, worship, and team building activities. Teachings started more basic/ for personal growth such as learning about God’s character, how to know God, how to deal with past hurt/ unforgiveness, gender talk, and other such stuff. Later teachings included learning to relate to different cultural contexts, how to share the gospel, and how to hear God’s voice/ be led by the Holy Spirit. Scenarios were very interesting and included staff members acting out and creating a scenario where you have to respond and then afterwards talk it out in group discussion. For example, scenarios included going to the airport, going to the marketplace to buy food, or going to a house visit. It was helpful so that when we are out in the field and experience these things we can know how to react and learn from mistakes during our training. Team building activities were good as they split us in various teams with different people from our squad to do a random activity and see how we interacted/ reacted to it. After we would talk about what happened, what we liked, and how to improve. After a day of these various things, we would then have to set up our sleeping areas again.
Now to what my big takeaways/ lessons learned were. As the title suggests, during training camp I have been learning to let things go. God convicted me of how I have to depend on Him for everything and how broken I am by myself. I thought that giving up the next 10 months of my life for Christian missions was enough, but I have been learning that I need to literally surrender all including my body and mind. I don’t need to worry/ focus about being sleep deprived, hungry, sick, or anxious. I just need to be fully dependent on Him. Another hard lesson I’ve been realizing is how I need to fully put my identity and worth in Christ. While I’ve always tried and thought I was doing this, I’ve realized a lot of my identity has really been in what I do/ did and on what title I had. Having given up my job and various church ministry stuff and having been put in a completely different situation, I have been challenged with feeling out of place/ not needed. There were many random things/ skills during this training camp that I thought I would be good at/ didn’t realize that I would need that I didn’t feel equipped to do. Missions requires a lot of flexibility, quick thinking/ spontaneity, and random skills/ abilities. This has definitely humbled me and made me realize that each part of the body is important and that there are different times and seasons for roles and such. In this season my role is to be a servant to whatever the need is.
All in all, my training camp experience was good but has been physically and mentally hard. I am thankful for the experience and will continue to try to walk out dependence on God and rooting my identity in Him. I need to daily fill myself up with God so that when challenges and difficulty comes, I can overflow with God’s love rather than my natural flesh. This is what I learned and needed in training to be most effective in the field. Moving forward, I will be spending the next 2 months in Thailand and will hope to continue growing and being used as a servant to bring forth God’s kingdom. I would appreciate prayers for fruit in ministry, team unity, team health, and for my body/ sleep to be fully restored.
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