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.