Fear and trembling.

I just got back from my first intensive as a part of my Impart course this year. Much more information, I'm sure, will be going up here at some point, but there's something in particular that happened during the week that I knew I needed to write about. I mean, I wrote about it in my journal/diary/thing, but more than that.

Anyway.

It was Thursday. That's yesterday. Wow. OK.
They'd said that the morning was a 'Mystery Morning'. All we knew was that we'd need clothes that could get dirty, stuff for going outside, and we were going offsite. Then on the morning, we were also told we should bring wallets and ID. Needless to say, people were starting to spread rumours about what it was. A couple of people were mentioning skydiving. Which was somewhat ludicrous, considering how much that would cost for all of us. The talk before we got on the bus was about conquering fears, though.
Well, it was a car that I got into, but you know what I mean. The car started driving, and it wasn't long before we pulled into a place that said Paintball.
Why, oh why, did it have to be paintball?

Now, I love laser tag. Have heaps of fun with it, really enjoy it. But paintball - I had never done it before, and I had never even had a little bit of wanting to do it. I didn't enjoy getting hurt, and I didn't enjoy hurting others. I'm an absolute wuss when it comes to pain. You say it's nothing, I'm already crying like a baby on the ground. OK, not quite. But I don't handle it well. I had gotten better over time, though, so I thought it might be OK.

We were only in the first round. I'd gotten a couple of ricochets, splash backs and near misses, but no real hits. Then I got one in the thigh, from not too far away. It wasn't close, but it was mid range rather than far.
The pain felt intense, excruciating. I felt like someone had just done the Cruciatus curse on me. I pretty much just stayed in that one spot the rest of the round. I shot a couple of times, but I could barely move without exposing myself. That wasn't going to happen. I got one guy who was coming around the back, because I was completely open to him. Then, finally, the whistle blew and the round ended. I had probably been killed, but I couldn't have moved while it was all going.

As soon as we were told we could sit down and relax, I just collapsed. I was sobbing, shaking. One of the leaders took me into the bunker area, and we sat there alone for a while. She tried to talk to me, calm me. For a bit, I just got worse. I was shaking really badly; breathing in short gasps; and sobbing uncontrollably. And that was the thing. I couldn't control it. Not in the slightest. Not at all. I was helpless to it. I was just absolutely terrified. The leader was using the word trauma. I guess that's probably as good a word as any.

Eventually, the leader was able to calm me down, bit by bit, and get me to try and talk to her about what had happened. Thing was, I really didn't understand it myself. I mean, sure, it had hurt, but it had stopped hurting before I'd even finished the game. The only thing that made sense to me was what I called a fear of pain. And it mainly related to one particular experience I had a bit earlier.

Right at the end of year 12, I got an ingrown toenail. But I thought it would be fine. I just left it. Washed it out when I went in the shower, tried to squeeze the pus out regularly and all that. Then my mum saw it, and she was like, "Your toe's twice as big as it was!" It wasn't quite, but it had been a couple of months. The doctor said pretty quickly that it needed to be operated on.

So we came back after a day or two for that. They said they were going to use a local anaesthetic, and it would completely numb the area. I wouldn't feel a thing. I would feel the injection, though; my goodness, that hurt.

But the anaesthetic didn't work. It just made it feel like what it does when you've been sitting on your hand for half an hour or so. You can still feel, but it's a weird sort of feeling.

But it hurt. My goodness, it hurt. Thankfully, my mum was there the whole time, and she helped me through it. But that was like torture, pretty much. And just a toe. Yep.

So that's what I told the leader, and the other one as well a bit afterwards. They talked to me a bit about fear, and pain - it's not really something I can give justice to in recounting. Suffice it to say, me and God have some work to do. Or rather, I do, and God's saying I do. Or something. I dunno. I don't always understand. But as long as I understand what it is that I don't understand, I figure I'm getting somewhere....

It was an intense and scary experience. But I also know that it happened for a reason. That this isn't something that God wants for me; he doesn't want me to be trapped by this fear. And I can say pretty comfortably that that's definitely not my only fear.

Going into Impart, I thought that it would help me find direction; clarity. I think, however, that God's saying we've got a bit of work to do on me before I worry about that stuff too much. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure. An experience.