We’re ALL IN

If you’ve been following my past few summers, you know that I was an Eagle Lake Camp Counselor for two summers. While I knew God told me that my time with them was up and to pursue a different kind of summer, my heart still longed to be with them everytime I saw a post about orientation and new friendships being formed. SO, God gave me some awesome signs that it’s okay to love EL, be thankful for my memories, and still be present here at Adventures in Missions. The morning I was preparing to leave STL and fly to ATL, I opened my Bible app to the verse of the day, Romans 8:37. This verse was our theme verse my first summer with EL and holds such dear memories. The second sign came a couple days into training camp, and I don’t want to spoil it just yet, but it was our camp theme my second summer, the title of this blog post, ALL IN. One sign for each theme of the summer. How perfect is our God??

So folks, are you ready to jump ALL IN with me?? Here we go…

Meeting my teammates at the airport was so surreal. I’d been communicating with them almost daily for the past couple weeks / months via group message, so actually hearing their voices and learning their personalities is crazy cool. There’s 12 of us. 10 participants and 2 leaders (who just signed on a week ago, crazy!!). A group of all girls could seem like a challenge, but I can already tell it’s going to be GREAT!!

Wow, training camp has come and gone already. It was a blur, but a happy blur for sure ;).

Training Camp is definitely unique… We worship twice a day, hear awesome speakers, sleep in tents, take bucket showers, and get served food from all over the world. Adventures is so focused on the Spirit and serving Him, rather than focusing on small details and plans (which is just the neatest thing!!).

The session over the Holy Spirit was so Spirit filled (obvi). After focusing on partnering with Him, and being invited into God’s ministry, the worship band played light music and all the leaders went around and prayed the Spirit over all the participants. I was crying. God was so present and so evident in that room and in our lives.

One of the neatest sessions, and where the second sign comes into play, was on Listening Prayer. This is something that isn’t focused on as much in the church. We talk to God all day long, but we never take the time to just stop and listen to what He has to say back… So that night we did. We listened to the Holy Spirit (wow He’s cool) and prophesied over each other. We broke into groups of five, closed our eyes, and spoke words over each other. Jess, one of our fearless leaders, randomly picked one of us, not letting us know who was picked, and this was the girl we were all going to speak over. Some cool stuff was spoken, including images, songs, encouragements, and words. After a little bit, I just knew it was over me. And come to find out, it was!! Some of the things spoken over me were like “passion” “writing” “encouraging” and (here comes the second sign) “ALL IN”, which was our camp theme my second summer at EL. God is love, and peace, and encouragement, and I totally see that all in my teammates.

The last day, was a little bit more of a challenge… Even though we had every opening zipped up, our tent just couldn’t hold out the Atlanta rain that came POURING down. Soooooo, needless to say, all of our stuff got wet. We pushed our schedule back a bit to give everyone time to pack everything up and then lay it out to dry inside during our last session. Some of the soaking items were able to be put in a dryer, but a good majority of the damp items just had to get packed away!

That night we loaded up and headed to the airport to spend the night! While that sounds like a super fun world traveler thing to do (I am glad I had the experience) it wasn’t so sweet. Between arriving at 11:20 pm, the frigidness (is that a word?) of the airport, no sleeping materials, prickly carpet, and getting up at 4am, I only slept about an hour and a half, yikes! Anyway, we wake up ready to be in Nicaragua!! What do you know, the flight was delayed a couple hours. We got a new flight schedule, which means we had to trade our day in Grenada for a day in the Houston airport, so basically the same right?!? And actually as I type this, I’m sitting on the aircraft that’s supposed to be heading to Nicaragua (a full hour ago) but is currently grounded due to storms. The Lord is obviously protecting us from something, even though we might have impatient spirits. We’ll get there in His timing, I’m 100% sure of it!

I love to hear from you all, thank you for your constant support and love!! Stay tuned for more updates throughout the summer!! If you would like, you can subscribe to this blog and receive an email notification everytime I post!

God is so present in this organization, in my teammates, and in my life. All praise is due to Him!!

Until next time,
Abby