The short story
Training camp was awesome! I learned things about myself
and God that I hadn’t learned before or had never believed. I’m officially
going to Swaziland after Mexico with an amazing team and am so excited to see
them again! I haven’t posted many blogs lately so I thought that I would give
you all a detailed look at training camp. Its long but I know no other way to
explain all that God used to change my heart there without telling you about it.
The long story
(part 1 of 3)
Training camp for AIM is a time of team
building and bonding and is different for each team. And I never thought I would get to know a
group of people so fast! Even leaving
the airport was a team experience. Thankfully
I’ve been to this airport a few times now and after a few short instructions
from friends had some idea of where to go. When we got there we were separated
into our teams, given an envelope and told not to open it until our entire team
was there. As we waited for others to
arrive we slowly got to know each other through more than our facebook and blog
pages. After my small team of Molly McRae, Lila Dillon, and Jessica Leonardi
were there, we opened our envelopes. The directions sent us to a homeless
church called Eagle’s Nest,
the catch was we had to use public transportation to get there. All teams got
there same and sound. We had little down time, a little worship, and Tag
Thompson (director of the Novas project) gave us an overview of the long
weekend as best he could without letting us in on too many details.
The
next part was going out into downtown Atlanta, to spend the night on the
streets as a homeless person. We weren’t
told exactly what we were doing before we went out, just that we needed to
leave all wallets, cell phones and baggage in locked room at the church. All
that we could take with us was a water bottle or two. We were separated into
teams, mine was almost the same from the airport adventure but we added Bryan
Marsh who drove in from Kentucky. We went out to an area known as Five Points
and from there were told that we had four assignments (team builders) to be
completed during the night, that we couldn’t leave a four block radius, and
that we couldn’t return to the church until 7:30 the next morning. For those of
you that are at this point beginning to worry about our safety, we did have two
leaders with us, Mary Hollis and Barton Girdwood, and both of them had cell
phones in case we needed them for an emergency. They were there pretty much as spectators, not answering questions that
involved, What are we supposed to do tonight? So that night we ministered to
the homeless, meeting them at their level as best we could and just taking the
time to listen. There was Jimmy Jackson that sang us a great soul song. There
was Tim the artist that drew us a picture in 5 minutes that we prayed over when
he was done. And there was Trent the
deaf man that was excited to realize that some of us knew basic sign language.
While quite a few people that we met were drunk or high, we quickly learned how
to communicate within the team and when we need our men to step into a
situation to make us feel safer. We slept behind some columns outside a
building for two hours (Mary kept watch) and made it through the night same and
sound.
From there spent an hour or two
sleeping at the church – blissful sleep! We then rode on a school bus out to
Gainesville, GA to AIM’s main training camp. And from here things start to get
blurry and run together. At lunch our final team member joined us, Jonathan
(Jon) Melo. The rest of the afternoon
was filled with team builders and the staff trying to figure out who could be
on the same team and where they would send us. Of course all we knew was that
we were doing team builders. =) That night we went to bed in our tents with
some Georgia fire ants to keep us company, and there’s more to come about that
one later 😉
