I am absolutely going to be stretched this block. I’ll skip right over the Basilica and orientations and meeting the team and head right on into debrief tonight.
We finished up dinner in the meeting room of Hotel Galaxie and I started what I thought was a pretty standard first-full-day debrief. We did the “one word” exercise to sum up the day and then had anyone who chose “unpack” their word and externally process the day. Eric jumped in a lot more than the team leaders I’ve known before (granted, that’s a total of two). I was initially glad of that just because he knows the team so well and I’m still trying to figure out 34 people’s names (and it doesn’t help to have Lindsey, Lizzi, Liz, Lacey, Lorie, and Laura all sitting next to each other). I ended up being glad of his input for a totally different reason as I finally learned to shut up and let God work.
By the end of what I originally planned to be a maybe 45-minute debrief of the few events of the day, Jodie had spoken in tongues, Liz had been healed, half the group had been prayed over and we’d had probably more than an hour of on-the-fly testimonies and confession of sins.
Not to brush off the experience with a joke, but Eric said smiling at the end “Sorry, Danny, I know this usually doesn’t happen until the last night.” The thought hadn’t even occurred to me until then, but from that second I knew that first, this will be an amazing and fruitful group and that second, I am going to be stretched beyond my imagination for the next ten days. Other than that, I’m not going to even try to describe it because I absolutely cannot do it justice, no matter how much my Grandpa and my pareja think of my ability to write. I’ll just say that I have a lot to process, and that the Holy Spirit was present.
Sarah asked me in the Taxi on the way home whether I’d ever been a part of anything like that. “Nope!” She just laughed. I’m so glad that Cameron told us during our meeting how important it would be for Sarah to just be a member of the team and for me to handle logistical things, because I can tell already how important it is going to be for me personally to be an observer here and for her personally to get to worship through a kind of service and with a group of people that are both right up her ally. Not that I plan to set myself apart from the group, and not that Sarah is not going to be a leader, but I feel like God is pulling us to totally different rolls than last block and where we will be able to serve this team and serve Him and where we will both grow ourselves.
