I hate you food poisoning!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well let’s just say it’s been a hard few days… it started off with my decision to read the New Testament straight through. I’ve read the whole Bible in a One Year Bible way, with small passages from the old and new testaments each day, and I’ve read bits and pieces my whole life, but never in a continual manner. I finished Matthew, and realized just how inconsistent I felt it was, how the things I’d always told myself I believed weren’t necessarily backed up. People have used verses my whole life to prove points that, looked at in context, really don’t match up to what they were saying. I feel like we as a generation have made Christianity what we want it to be, something so easy and full of peace, but really I just felt a lot of frustration. I just didn’t understand so much, and it made me wonder, is my hard heart, like the people Jesus spoke of? I would find comfort in one passage, only to be brought back to my frustration in another. I want my view of God to be based on the Bible, rather than what I’ve always been told, what the world tells me about Him. Please ask me specifically about what I’ve been struggling with when I get home, because I know I’ll be tempted to just slip back into my “I don’t know the answers but that’s ok” mindset. While I know we can’t know all the answers, and even Jesus’s disciples struggled with faith, I want to really know what I can believe, otherwise how can I tell others?
I felt like I had come to so much peace while here, so much realization of who God was to me, but just by reading one book of the Bible I have lost so much of that, and maybe that bothers me more than anything. I don’t want my faith to be that shallow, that easily swayed. The other girls on my team embarked on this journey with me, and they are feeling very similar to the way I am, so please just pray for us, that we would open our hearts to what God has to tell us, and that he would use the next week and half to show us things we’ve never seen before.
Yesterday morning we woke up to paint the CDC and Kingsley told Jen and I that Meret and Tam were sick… we thought they probably just had a cold or something so the 2 of us just started painting… until I threw up. Well actually I went back to paint again after that, like I do, but then I realized that I was basically just splashing paint on the wall and had no idea what I was doing, so I went to lay down, and within with next few hours threw up multiple times and lost much of whatever was in my body, um, another way. Every fiber of my body felt like I’d fallen off a 20 story building and I couldn’t even lay down because it hurt too bad. Honestly I was thinking death sounded pretty great… I don’t think I have ever been that sick in my life. I finally fell asleep about 8:00 and woke up at 3:30 am… unable to fall back asleep because I was so hungry, but absolutely not for Indian food. I remembered there were some fruit loops at the bakery we got the despicable poisonous turnovers things at, so I just sat in a chair til 7:15, when I finally decided to walk across the street and see if that had anything at a little stand there (I’ve never been outside the gates alone… if I hadn’t felt so sick it would have been invigorating) They didn’t though, so I drew a picture of fruit loops and rang the doorbell, then gave my lovely drawing to Kingsley’s mom, who actually figured it out! Today I have felt much better, but I still just don’t feel good, and food doesn’t really work… we have a 5 hour car ride ahead of us tomorrow and the other 2 girls have very similar stories to mine, so we’re gonna need some intense prayer!! Don’t worry, we’re being very well taken care of though… they bought us cake, because you know, that’s what you want when you’re sick, and they were just sure we’d want to drink some oatmeal. Kingsley also offered to carry us to the roof, which could have been awesome if touch didn’t feel like death. He really is super sweet though, and I guess his parents and his grandma both called to chew him out for letting us eat food outside of the home!
Pray for Jen too… her 21st birthday is tomorrow, and she was already a little bummed that we’d be traveling for most of it… 3 sick friends really wouldn’t make it any better! Love you and MISS YOU ALL!!!!!