Israel.

One more, let’s goooo!

These words were shouted at about 7:00 in the evening yesterday by yours truly. If you are familiar with my competitive nature, I am sure you can picture exactly how I said it.

But why was I shouting this? Let’s go back a week.

It is lunchtime, and we are eating sandwiches and a bag of chips and mentally preparing for the worst. We are going on this “man hike,” which is supposed to make grown men cry. This “hike” was led by a former marine and associate of AIM. Personally, I thought everyone was being dramatic. I wondered how bad a hike could be. Then we got to the starting line, and I realized this wasn’t a hike. The former marine said, “You will not be able to do this on your own; you will be forced to rely on each other and God to give you strength to complete this.”

And here is what “this” is: there is a .7-mile trail here on campus. Our goal was to complete 11 laps around this trail with certain specifications. First, one of our eight members of the team had to be blindfolded at all times while on the trail. Second one of us had to be continuously crab-walking at all times. What is crab walking, you ask? Crab walking is walking on all fours with your stomach in the air. Or more commonly known as a Japanese torture method. The third specification was that someone had to be carried at all times.

And I haven’t even told you about the fun part yet. There was a 150-pound tire, a 180-pound log, and a 220-pound tire. Each of these had to be carried all the way around the trail once during our 11 laps. And sometime in between all this, our team had to do 800 squats and pushups.

So, given this new info, I concluded it would be challenging, but we would probably finish in the 5 hours we had been given. I was wrong. Our team decided to get the heavy stuff out of the way first. We first went to the 150-pound tire, which wasn’t awful but still difficult. Then we went for the big tire. This was very hard; tensions began to rise, and we were all pissed. Why? Because it was hard and we couldn’t do it. Eventually, we completed the lap and decided to do some laps without the heavy stuff to “rest.” It is now lap the beginning of lap 5, and we have the log in our sights. The other teams got two other sticks and used them like a stretcher. So we decided to do that about 100 steps in the sticks broke, and so did our motivation. Someone asked what time it was, and we came to realize we had 21 minutes left. Five hours gone, and our morale was at an all-time low. We eventually managed to get the log across, and we sat there at the finish line, completely exhausted and pissed. We didn’t finish, and we had given our all. We were bloody, muddy, and soaked because it had rained for 3 hours. And in our misery, we came up with our team name, Israel, which means “Wrestles with God.” Because that is precisely what we had done for the past 5 hours, there was no relying on him or really each other. We were prideful and tried to be what we thought a “Man” was, and we all just butted heads.

Fast forward to yesterday. The atmosphere right now is tired. A lot of us are sick, and we are all exhausted. So yesterday, we had an hour and a half of free time, and right before this started, our team leader Ethan got everyone together and said we still have six laps left, boys. This was the last thing we wanted to do. I had already fallen asleep in the session before, and all I wanted to do was take a nap. But then Ethan said, “There will be times when we are in Cambodia, and we don’t like our ministry, and we still have 17 days left there. Are you going just to quit?”

And so, 15 minutes later, the eight of us found ourselves at the starting lines again with six laps left. It took us 2 hours to finish, but we did. We treated it differently this time; we prayed before every lap, and the moment one of us was tired of crab walking, the other would take over. There was no pride anymore. We were one unit. We either finished together or we didn’t.

Seven hours in total, eight miles of crab walking, about 2000 pounds carried across the finish line. We entered with the mindset of how can I glorify myself. We left as one team. Team Israel.

Thanks for all the prayers and support.

-Drew McKinney

P.S. This is me halfway through the first day.