Changing For the Better

Here I am, an hour before we leave for the airport, finally finding the time to make my premier as a blogger. I’ve never publicized my thoughts, or anything like this before so I am going to have to ask you to bear with me through the awkward stage. Speaking of awkward, I am typing this on a keyboard that is about 7 inches wide. Thank you Jesus for my MacBook back home that I took for granted every day. Alright, time to get serious. When I left Chicago on Monday I had no idea what to expect out of this week. Honestly, I had a lot of selfish thoughts about how lame and boring this “Training Camp” probably was going to be. After all, I signed up for this to go to Africa, not Georgia, right? Wrong. After the first 24 hours of camp I knew that I really wasn’t ready to go Kenya and that I still had a lot of doubts and barriers to overcome which was actually really frightening to me. I was starting to second guess if this was really where God wanted me. I looked around and listened to my teammates tell these stories of the Lord SPOKE to them and literally CALLED them to Kenya. Wow, I was totally overwhelmed. Here I was, this kid from Wisconsin who had no direct instructions from God or Jesus to come on this trip, but just a selfish desire. Was this where I was supposed to be? Well, through hours of worship and prayer these past few days I continued to ask Jesus to clear up these uncertainties and bad feelings, I finally felt what I had been missing out on these past 20 year. I heard his voice. He has totally put a new light in me and I can feel him more than ever. I have this camp to thank for that and I just last night I was thinking about how devastating it would have been to not have had this experience. Crazy how God can turn your thoughts around like that.

Before we leave for the airport I just want to share a quick story about our first day here. I arrived in Atlanta at 12:30 in the afternoon. I claimed my four-hundred pounds of luggage and met up with Blair, our team leader. I was the first guy to arrive so I just sat with him for a couple hours talking and learning from each other. Our last team member didn’t get there until 7:30, so you can imagine that we are all pretty anxious to get out of that airport. We were initially told that we would be traveling to AIM’s camp in Gainsville, Georgia, but once we split up into our small groups, the plans changed. We were given an envelope with instructions in it: “Get your team to the Safehouse Outreach, Downtown Atlanta. You have 20 dollars to get everyone there and you have to carry all of your bags.” What the heck had we gotten ourselves into? After about 5 minutes of confusion and chaos, we got organized and purchased tickets on the Marta, which is Atlanta’s rail-system. We hopped on and took off towards downtown. After praying together on the train we started to talk to this man sitting near us. His name was Troy. Troy was an Atlanta native and aspiring t-shirt designer/biblical guru. The dude had some wisdom and was really interested to learn about our trip and about us. It really got my juices flowing for the trip just seeing how excited we were making other people already. So we get to the Safehouse, eat some dinner, watch a film describing what exactly they do there (which is awesome, I suggest you look it up online… they are part of some amazing programs for the inner-city of Atlanta), and then got our next envelope. The note inside told us that tonight we would be living homeless on the streets of Atlanta without money, phones, or any electronics. Wow! A few jaws definitely hit the floor as I read these directions to the group. We had 10 minutes to get ready and everyone was given gloves and 1 blanket was provided for each group. We met outside after throwing on our layers and joined in prayer before we “Hit the streets”. I am really running out of time here and I hate to put the least detail into the most important part of this story, but I don’t want to hold my group back from getting ready to leave. I’ll try to sum the rest up without leaving out anything too important. We left the building at 9:30 and we weren’t allowed to return until 4:30. Oh, by the way, it was 25 degrees outside. We tried to talk to as many people as we could that night and it was amazing to learn from them. It was so humbling to talk to these men and women who had nothing, literally nothing, but their faith in God. To hear them pull these verses from the bible and tell us about Jesus was so incredible and really broke me down. What had I been doing to myself so far in life? I’ve been living my for myself and taking everything for granted while these people were outside, freezing and hungry, thanking God for his love and for life. I hope to share some more direct stories from this night with all of you later. There are so many great things that happened that night and I really want you to hear them.

I want to end my first blog post with what has changed with me. God has really wrecked me this week in a great way. He has broken me down to nothing just so he can rebuild me. I have learned that it was time for me to stop chasing God and blaming him for leaving me out. I learned that it was time for me to fall down and let him lead. I know that he is paving me a path that is bound to lead to amazing things, not only for the next 3 months, but for the rest of my life. I can’t wait to get over there and take this adventure to the next level. My lesson from this past week was that I didn’t need to build myself up to God, but to break myself down.