Clear 2012 - Week 1

Well, here it is, my summer blog about working with Clear.  Hope you enjoy… 

Week 1 - Training Camp

The first week of summer is training camp for the staff.  Training camp had been described to me as many things; Camp for staffers, Detox week, Leadership training, and Staff development.  As the week progressed, all of these things definitely happened.  

Something that was very intriguing to me was that we didn’t wait very long to have an encounter with God.  From my experience, camps typically reserve the first day for everyone to get acquainted.  As a result of not waiting, our times of corporate worship were intense from beginning to end and we saw the Spirit move in powerful ways among all of our staff.  Many moments throughout this week, we just worshipped.  A “worship leader” wasn’t necessarily needed, which kind-of blows my mind a little bit.

I also had my first opportunity to “lead” worship for the staff during training camp.  I don’t know how much leading I really did as I could start a song and the staff would pretty much take over.  I also felt extremely intimidated in leading for the group the first time because Clear has some amazing worship leaders already.  I didn’t really think I would match the others but then I realized that it’s not about me or the other worship leaders, it’s fully about the God we are serving.  What’s nice is that the staff knows that.  They are not ashamed to hold back, no matter who’s leading.  

Throughout the week I also had the chance to clear up some very important things in my life.  I was able to declare truth over extremely huge lies that have been hindering me.  I will blog about this in more depth after the summer is over but it’s literally life changing.

The last day of training camp was bittersweet.  After a good morning of some leadership/crisis training, we headed out to load up equipment for the remainder of the summer.  This was a chaotic few hours for me as I was the leader for the load and I felt extremely unprepared and unorganized.  However despite my feelings, it went very well.   

Friday evening we split up into our individual teams at different host homes.  It was nice to go from the big group of about 70 staffers to our smaller team of 15.  I’m starting to get to know the people on my team better and I’m excited about working with them this summer.  We had a nice ‘family’ meal around a gigantic table at our host home, which was huge in itself.  I have learned that some of the girls have devised a plan to force me out of my “shell” throughout the summer.  I don’t really think I have a shell, but they do so we’ll see what happens.  

David