Reaaaallly late...

Yay 24/7 prayer rooms. Apart from the downside that you're really tired the next day, you get to stay up to all hours - even to the extent that you break curfew! - under the proviso that you're praying in some way... My shift doesn't start for another 20 minutes.

Yes, it's that time of year again at 614 Regent Park, where the same group of about 10 people commit to filling all the prayer slots for 24 hours a day, seven days a week cos everyone else is too slack... seriously... Should've brought in fairy lights. They work every time... KIDDING.

The theme for our prayer room is the scripture from Joel 2:28-30,32 - the whole "In those days I will pour out my spirit on everyone, your young men will see visions; your old men will dream dreams" bit.


Possibly while I am quite tired is not the best time to write interesting blogs...


Anyway, today we went to a cemetary in class where we saw this monument commemorating the Salvos who died when the Empress of Ireland sank in 1914 and a heap of Salvos officers and soldiers died. Aaron White and Steve Court say in a book of theirs that those (salvos) who were rescued had no life belts on cos apparently all the Salvos had given up their life belts to others, saying "I can die better than you can". The whole thing sank in like 15 minutes or something though, so it was pretty fast and pretty tragic.

Dave Ivany was teaching us that class, and his grandfather had been one of the ones rescued - his grandfathers' parents and sister had all drowned. And he bought us ice cream :) Thanks Dave :)

So yeah, it was this huge big deal - more passengers died than with the Titanic or something; 1012 people died altogether,but the tragedy was somewhat overshadowed by the outbreak of World War One...


And then earlier tonight Matt and Fiona came home with a starved kitten, so they fed it and cleaned it up, and then it peed on the couch. Matt ended up taking it home for the night till they could get it to a animal place. It was cute, but really skinny... Fun fun fun :)


L8r...

Baby Sunshine

This is Sean holding a baby in Newark. Sean is the high school student doing his co-op placement at 614, and he joined us for our mission trip to New York. His nickname was given to him by Iris - he was called "the baby". But now his nickname has been updated to "Baby Sunshine". If anyone has seen Remember the Titans, they will understand. It's because of the hair... :)

So really, this is a photo of Baby Sunshine holding a baby. Awwwwww :) She fell asleep while he was holding her, and again when he was holding her during church. The Newark people were very impressed, and said he must have "the touch", cos she was crying during church last week before Sean came... awwww :)

Newark

Picture 1 is the guys pretending to smash the computer; picture 2 is when we did a march around the block, and picture 3 is Zacchea (Sugar) and the other 2 girls who sat with me for church. The middle one fell asleep on me, and they are also all sunbeams... (at least the 2 on the right are) and the right hand one is Shekina?

Lol, no one is going to read all this :) I am doing like, four blogs for this one trip, and everyone is just going to be like, too many really long blogs - can't be bothered. Oh well. I will read them :)

Newark is one of Project 1:17's ministry sites - it is an Urban ministry corps (I think it's a corps anyway...) There are about a million kids everywhere and the house where they do stuff is always crowded.

I really liked going there. The area is a gang area - the part of Newark where the house is - that's Bloods' territory - and the Bloods' are very supportive of the Salvos work in the area. Ten minutes closer to the city - in like the centre part, is the contested ground where they fight alot, and a bit further on is the Crib's? Crip's? Territory. So while we were in Newark, we weren't allowed to wear any red or blue - we had to wear neutral colours.

We were there to help clean up for an inspection, and for a kids program on Wednesday, and then again all day on Sunday for church and Sunday School. Which aren't at the same time. They had breakfast first (on Sunday - Mother's Day) sausages, ham, scrambled eggs and grits - all of which were made when we got there. Then we split up for doing the different ages of Sunday School - I helped with the teens - we talked about idols in our lives and then smashed a computer monitor (wrapped in a sheet) as a symbol of smashing idols in our lives. Went down really well for some strange reason, lol!!

They do things really differently there!! Captain Vanjy expects alot from those kids, and they are great! I think maybe we don't expect enough of our kids here in Regent Park... FOR INSTANCE. They were singing the Salvos doctrines they had learned (up to the 4th one I think) in church, and Captain Vanjy gets up and is like "I get the feeling that some of you young people think this is IRRELEVENT!! That it doesn't matter, it's stupid! It's pointless!! Well you can tell me how IRRELEVENT it all is when you can't come on youth camp!! Cos I'm telling you if you can't tell me all eleven doctrines by the time we go on youth camp, you'll be left sitting on the side of the road CRYING!! Your ticket to get to youth camp is knowing these eleven doctrines!!" And she would leave them too!! So all these kids are there singing the first 4 or 5 doctrines, lol; and apparently she was just as gung ho when they had to learn their Junior Soldier's pledge last year - they were on a hike, and she's like, right! We're not leaving here till each one of you can tell me the pledge!!! And Heather (who was visiting) was sitting there sweating and hoping she didn't have to know it - they'd have been there all night, lol!!!

And yeah. After Sunday school was church which went for like, 2 hours, holy mackerel, and then we had lunch - BBQ and veggies and stuff. It was really good. But church was a killer!! Me, Sean and Fiona all had kids fallen asleep all over us by half time, it was classic :)

Other than that, just the way the community backed us up was so cool. We would be teaching a bunch of kids outside, and some young adult would walk past, and of course all the kids would be like, "Hey such and such! Can you get me this from the store?" or "Say hi to so and so for me!" or whatever, and the person would fully tell them off! "Pay attention to your class!", "You're in class, you should be paying attention!". As opposed to Regent Park, where everyone always just interrupts or distracts or whatever. It was cool.

New York, New York

Talk about stereotypes...
So you know how all the advertising make New York like this fully huge city - capitalism central, with SOOO much shopping - the whole New York minute thing? And how everyone is dressed like supermodels and walk around with a million shopping bags, and everyone has everything they always wanted? And the Statue of Liberty is this huge monument and everything...
And then in geography it's all about how New York is part of this megalopolis that is really just one continuous city extending halfway down the east coast of the USA?

Yeah. I never wanted to visit New York. Why bother going to where everything is so expensive and everyone is this obnoxious arrogant airhead, and there isn't a square metre of wilderness for miles, and everything is filthy dirty?

It just goes to show you how successfully ads and TV shows display everything just the way they want to be viewed. And I always hated it.

But now that I've actually been there, I'm glad, because all the media garbage really was a lot of garbage. I was genuinely stunned that there were so many trees in and around New York. Like seriously! SO many! Everything is not as grand and shining as they would have you believe - people there are really just normal people, the city doesn't just link continually down to other cities, and everyone's not a supermodel.
So. The real deal?
TIMES SQUARE is everything they want the rest of New York to be like, if I know my ads. Just that section is everything the stereotype says of New York. Super expensive, flashing neon signs and a million shoppers rushing everywhere.
The STATUE OF LIBERTY is nowhere as big as it is in the movies. Half it's height is the pedestal it's standing on, and from the ferry it's tiny. And Fiona says you can't even see anything looking out from the windows at the top. Kinda boring really. New York has got nothing on Paris for awesome monuments...
EMPIRE STATE BUILDING. I saw it once from the other end of Manhattan Island, and got a really bad photo. But it looked cool from what I could see.
SHOPPING? Yes, there's lots, and yes it's generally expensive. But there are tonnes of places that aren't - those "I love NY" t-shirts can be found dirt cheap - if you want to risk the quality... And I scored a pair of skate shoes for $15 somewhere.
MANHATTAN? Is not all tall buildings. The south part of the island is great - old buildings and brick roads, small shops and lanes and street markets. And trees lining so many streets. Much nicer than Times Square.
CENTRAL PARK? Huge and gorgeous. Trees, fields, playing fields, gardens, playgrounds - and I haven't seen so much green for a long time. Spring comes quickly here - it was so green in NY, and then we got back to Toronto, and found the same thing had happened. In a week.

So you take a 10 minute drive away from Harlem? (in New York city) And you're in forest covered mountains. Seriously. If you drive out of Toronto, for like three hours its all developed and grey. But you leave New York and drive north? And after about half an hour of outer city it's all mountains, forests, streams and fly fishing for like four hours. With the occasional town. So that part was seriously cool.

So basically, New York was just your average city, that was bigger than normal. No biggie. There are heaps of better cities to visit. Parts are dirty and gross, parts are nice, there's a couple of interesting tourist places, but most of it is just normal city. Nothing great.

Photos up the top are of a) Central Park, and b) Times Square

Sick...

Being sick sucks.

So last Monday we drove down to the States to stay with the Project 1:17 people at the Officer's training college in Suffern, New York. And of course, that night I became violently ill. I was up all night throwing up - it was so disgusting... And I don't know whether it was because I ate too much junk food as snacks on the way down, or if it was the chicken and salad roll I had for tea on top of that, or whether it was food poisoning or something...
So either I ate waaaay too much, or waaaay too much junk food, or I got food poisoning. But I really don't think it was food poisoning - I had felt kinda sick all afternoon...
So yeah. I didn't eat at all on Tuesday, and I ate like, 2 half pieces of dry toast on Wednesday. And then small amounts of random buffet food for the rest of the time we were at the college.
Ew.

Anyway, it got me thinking. Because I have just finished this book about the start of The Salvation Army, and the life of William Booth, and the things they did to train officers (at one stage there were 10 000 officers; the majority of whom were under 25 - go figure).

And so this is the second training college that I have stayed at in the States. In this one, we got our own rooms - two were joined together with a kitchen between, and their own bathrooms. And mine and Grace's rooms together were so much larger than the base area of our house here in Toronto - so the two of us were sharing an area that in our house would include all of upstairs (3 bedrooms and the bathroom) plus Kingsley's room downstairs at least. So six people in our house as opposed to me and Grace at the training college. The college grounds are gorgeous, and it's built in a really nice neighbourhood, the cadets get a buffet for lunch and dinner during the week.

Anyway, my being sick as soon as I got there made it seem really bad how people in the west have like everything, while so many people in other places literally have nothing. I think it makes God sick to his stomach - sick like I was sick - throwing up all night, and then for the whole rest of the week the very sight of food made me nauseous. We live in disgusting extravagance and there are people starving to death. It's pretty sickening. Nauseating even. Kinda reminded me of when God taught his people through prophets marrying prostitutes or eating food cooked over dung. How to best teach Stephanie about extravagance? Make her violently sick... GREAT.

And then I compared officer training now to what it was in the beginning, and thought about how someone said that they wished cadets could be suspended over hell for two weeks or something to give them the heart for "the last, the lost and the least" who are perishing. And I thought about how very far away cadet training is from hell.

And in our debriefing, we were saying about how much closer our training is to original cadet training than actual cadet training. And I was like, yeah, we're super-cadets. And then Kingsley cracked up laughing. I was just being stupid :) Original officer training was WAY more intense.

And we talked about what Project 1:17 does better than Ignite - they get to do more planning and leading of groups, and they have maintenance skills training - construction and sewing and stuff which would be pretty cool. Good thing I've done a heap of that. But more couldn't hurt. Yay :)

*Note: Project 1:17 is a year long program based in the training college in New York for young people thinking of becoming youth pastors.