It’s been two weeks! (& coa – personal spiritual formation)

Hello everyone!! How’s it going? I’m sitting here on a windy relaxing day so excited to share with you all about everything I have learned and God has done in my life recently! I hope all is well with each of you, and I want you to know that I have been missing you all greatly and can’t wait to see you again… in many many moons :’)

I wanted to start with what the average day in my life looks like because I’m sure you’re wondering what were doing over here for a month in Georgia! On the usual, we wake up around 7 and do a devotional with our team (a smaller group of five within the squad of thirty) to learn more about what the Bible says followed by breakfast; the oatmeal is the best. We usually have a session after that where we learn about certain topics that relate to going abroad, or about who God is and how He loves us. After our session we usually have another lunch which is most commonly sandwiches, and either another session, worship, or free time to do laundry (might I add, BUCKET laundry… aka washing your clothes in a bucket and hanging them to dry), cleaning your tent, or hang with your new friends. Dinner’s up next, and then we usually end with an evening worship session or squad meeting to chat about logistics, and hang around until bed around 10p. Now that it’s been two weeks, we mainly are going to be hanging out and doing little things here and there, but the first two weeks were heavily saturated. We are getting lots of good time with our squad to bond and grow relations before we leave the country. For example, yesterday we did a family game day, and then a movie night (WE WATCHED RIO!!!!! side note, I’ve never related to a movie more where they’re leaving their comfy hometown to go out of country to live abroad and help their kind). Another thing they love to do here are mini scnerarios to help us practice for real life scenarios that we will run into on our time in the field. An example is when they took half of our bags/tents since they got “lost” in the airport, and now we have to survive the night by sharing with our new teammates! This was like, day 3 or 4 haha! What a way to connect! ;D they do lots of things like this to both prepare us to be flexible when things happen outside of our control and to grow our squad bond.

Now, these two weeks have been insane mentally and spiritually. While the day to day things sound chill, I was truly struggling with the shock of the newness of everything. I missed lots of comforts and was having some trouble adjusting to life here at first. To go a little deeper, I was feeling the extreme weight of what I thought it meant to follow God. Since I was so uncomfortable, but I was this is what God called me to do, I was struggling to see the Lord in it since I felt so sad in the first week here. I was constantly feeling like I wasn’t good enough and didn’t have the right tool skills for this trip, and was comparing myself to the others who were “getting it” or having fun. There were many times where I wanted to go home and even quit. I won’t forget this one time I was in the shower and was crying at the sadness of how I was feeling – which I thought my sadness was from missing comforts, but it was really because I was processing and thinking I was going to have to be uncomfortable forever if I wanted to live for God, but this isn’t the case. Now, this is where it all turns around and where I see my spiritual side of me grow in so many ways. I have been learning so much from our sessions, but I have learned a great deal from the Lord Himself starting thursday through a lovely woman, my mama. I called her one evening in trying to understand my thoughts, and it was like truth washed over me. It was like Mufasa (in this case, God) calling down to simba “remember, who you are!” I remember! She reminded me how God has worked in my life, and I was so focused on the task at hand and how others were doing things here that I forgot who I am and who the Lord made me to be!! I am soooo free now that I remember who I am and how God has been working in my life for so long 🙂 I also will mention I think some spiritual warfare went on since I had so much sadness, anger and comparison while sitting in this mindset of trying to “reach” God, rather than realizing He’s inside of me since I believe in Him. And since remembering, I have so much joy and confidence for this trip! So different than the girl who wanted to quit the day prior. My comparison is gone, and I am just focused on the things I am looking forward to in expectance that God will meet me there and provide! And when I miss the things from home, I miss it with joy that I have it rather than the sadness that I’m missing it. I am so grateful to Jesus that He reminded me who I am so I can live my life in freedom, peace and trust, rather than control and fear. So now I’m walking head high with excitment! Thank you for reading my testiment of the Love of God. This wont be the last time.

Also, I am looking forward to the next upcoming things around here! We have one more week here at training camp before we go serve at a young life camp for a week, and this week we are going on an overnight hike which I am super excited for! I can’t wait to share how that goes! After our week serving at younglife, we come back to training camp for a week, and then we leave the country right after that until May… whew, that’s going to be crazy! Can’t wait to keep you guys filled in!

<3, aubs

*COA stands for College of Athens, the college program I am doing while overseas. I get credit for some blogs when they relate to what my class is about 🙂