Week 2- (pt. 2) Training Camp!

  
We had squad wars this week! It is where the squads compete for points in a rock paper scissors tournament, hula hoop competition, and dodgeball. My squad is L squad and our color is green! We also get points for spirit and a dance/skit that had to involve the whole squad and be 3-6 minutes long. Ours was honestly elite, we sang some songs about Jesus, hit the Dougie, did mini skits on five of the main stories in the Bible, and ended with Elijah doing a backflip. We ended up getting second in dodgeball, won spirit, and won the dance/skit competition. We had started in 5th place for points and ended up winning squad wars haha. In conclusion, L squad does not take L’s, we only give them out;)

We had a baptism revival night that was so good! Worship was incredible as always, and so many people proclaimed their faith through baptism. Nearly half my squad was baptized and one of my hometown best friends (Maya) was also baptized for the first time! It was an honor to be there and have the chance to pray over everyone as they took this next step in their faith and were filled anew.

We had our first day of street evangelism! My squad went to a place about 20 minutes away in Gainesville to an area called “Little Mexico” with a high Hispanic population. The goal of the 1 1/2-2 hours we had for evangelism was to see where the Holy Spirit would take us and step out in our faith with the person we were partnered with. Honestly, I was skeptical and nervous about it, this was completely new to me and scared me haha. It ended up being so fruitful though and hearing everyone’s experiences was amazing. So many of my friend’s experiences were stories of boldly praying over people, giving them something sweet like a flower, or being a listening ear. These resulted in people being encouraged, some cried tears, and others were simply thankful:)

For me and my partner, Emerson, we ended up spending nearly the entire time at one place rather than going to multiple places. We got ice cream (had to take advantage of being off our campsite duh) then went into a Quinceañera dress store. We talked to the owners and learned that it was a family owned business for nearly 30 years. There were three generations of this family in the store which was so cool. We talked to the mom and learned about her sister and kids. We ended up playing with the kids for most of the time, giving them something to do and the mom a break. There were five kids under the age of ten, we mostly played with the three and six year old. The three year old was so cute and reminded me of my nephew Milo, he loved monster trucks and Spiderman haha. He told me this as he ate fruit loops and handed me flowers saying I was his crush after his mom had told me how he was a “ladies man” hahaha. Aside from playing with the kids, we met their abuela who only spoke Spanish, and learned that she had surgery a couple months back but recovery had been hard and she had fallen twice. We got the opportunity to pray over her in Spanish (Emerson is fluent), so that was amazing! They were all very thankful and so kind, it was so sweet to get to know them and hangout with them for that time:)

We also had a commitment signing (this was last week but I forgot to write about it) where we signed the paper saying we are committed to the World Race. It was cool though because we had to time to sit with the Lord on our own before entering a space where our leaders washed our feet and prayed over us. Then we could sit in our own prayer, take communion, and sign the commitment. The way it was done was so interesting and a cool space to be part of, it was also the first time having my feet washed in this way.

Anyways, we had a chill day where our squad had a “game day” and movie night all together. We played the games “fishbowl” and “houseparty” which made us all laugh haha, and also have been playing lots and lots of card games. For our movie night, we watched Rio, ate so many snacks, and door dashed Wing Stop and Wendy’s hahaha.

On Sabbath, we had squad church where our worship team did AMAZING and we did worship for an hour and half which was soooooo good. Then Jill lead communion with stale bread that Colton bought and Emerson gave a sermon on having child-like faith! Later that day, I called some of my people back home and played frisbee and soccer with some of my squad mates. We got pizza for dinner (yay), played spikeball, and two girls got haircuts haha.

Week two was so busy but so good! One of my favorite sermons of the week was about discerning the voice of God which I found so interesting. And my highlight of the week was definitely getting to see Maya get baptized:) thanks for reading!!