When I was 19, I went on a summer mission with an organization called Teen Missions International. It provided teenagers opportunity to experience overseas missions. Their teams went all over the world. I signed up to join the team going to Israel. But before you actually went out to the mission, you had to get some basic training. This happened at Boot Camp in Florida for 2 weeks.
So all teens for all teams gathered here. I think there were something like a thousand of us. There we met our team and began training together. They designed bootcamp to prepare for the harshest environments their teams could face. Some would go to places without running water, refrigeration, power and actual buildings. So we all had to live for 2 weeks in such conditions.
We had no showers. We had to learn to bathe in a pond or from a bucket of water. We had no cold drinking water. We lived in tents. Cinder block stalls without a roof served as our bathrooms.
We ran an obstacle course as a team each day. If we failed to complete it or one of our team members went outside the boundaries, we would get disqualified. That meant extra work and no free time. Yet it was all designed to force us to depend on each another, hold each other accountable and build team unity. We listened to lectures and teaching on the Bible and about the people and place of our mission. If we survived all that, we could go out as a team to our mission.
