This is kind of a short blog for the week because it was mostly sessions, but anyways, we hiked Mt. Yonah which was about two miles and took our group 2-3 hours, it was 3,000 feet in elevation and such a pretty view! We got to see the sunset and it was blindingly orange, SO PRETTY. We had our hiking backpacks, with tents and sleeping bags, as we hiked up so we could cook dinner and camp at the top. It was down pouring at one point, but it was peaceful to just sit in it and enjoy God’s creation:) Then we set up all of our tents and made a campfire where we cooked hotdogs for dinner. We woke up at 5am the next morning to hike down and stopped at Chick-fil-a for breakfast!
We had breakout sessions one day where you could choose to go to one to learn about leading worship, planning a sermon, or prayer/deliverances. I went to the prayer/deliverance session and got to learn about ways to pray for people and recognizing demons on people and what to do about it. We also talked about the spiritual gifts and got talking about speaking in tongues which was so interesting.
Beauty From Ashes is a women’s ministry and girls on each squad are chosen to be part of it as their role. They put together an event this week for all the girls of the squads where we all dressed up for dinner, worship, and three girls spoke. It was so cute and so much fun meeting the girls on the other squads. While we got dressed up and girly, the boys had what’s called the “man hike” where they have to do 11 one mile laps doing something different each time (crab walk, carry each other, carry a tire, etc.).
A couple random side notes: One of my favorite sessions this week was about how we serve an emotional God! We went to a laundromat this week and that was quite an experience, but I’m forever grateful to whoever invented laundry machines because buckets laundry is not the way to go. The laundromat was out of detergent and some of the people in my squad thought fabric softener was the same thing, one boy tried to put dryer sheets in his washer, hahahaha I said noooo, guys unfortunately that’s not how this works haha. We did a Target/Walmart run too so that was fun. We also had to clean the entire campus, so that took a good long minute, but that’s okay. My team decided on our team name! We are Team Compassion and we chose this because we felt like each of us had a big heart and we hope to consider pursuing that together on our race:)
