Last two weeks in review - Health and Natural Remedies

The weeks continue to fly by here at ARISE, which is bittersweet.  Talk of leaving and how much we are going to miss each other keeps entering into our conversations.  However, I will not talk of leaving, yet.

So this past week, David Asscherick flew in from Australia, his current residence, and taught this past week on the Great Controversy (origins of evil and why was sin permitted) and Gen 3-12.  He'll be teaching again this coming week and then head home for a few weeks before coming back for a longer teaching stint.  The week before we had another guest lecturer/adjunct Nyse (pronounced "nice") Collins with Sanare Life present on health and natural remedies, and this is where I'll begin...

Sanare Life Consultants focuses on retoring an individual's health through health education (sanara = restore, restoration); restoration will come to the people as they are educated and encouraged.  Nyse spent one week with us going over the basics of health, how God factors into our health and natural remedies to help with common ailments.  He will be returning in October to do a two-day health outreach on the University of Oregon campus.

Many who have read Ministry of Healing by Ellen White or attended any church health class, know there are two aspects to evangelism.  Nyse likes to call them the "dynamic duo": medical mission work (right arm of the Gospel) and the Gospel message.  God always meant for the two to work together and not to be taught/preached separately: Our Lord Jesus Christ came to this world as the unwearied servant of man’s necessity. He “took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses,” that He might minister to every need of humanity. Matthew 8:17, MH 17.1.  It is unfortunate that over time that the two were separated.  Through these lectures, we were reminded why you can't have one without the other.

Nyse broke down health into three aspects: physical health, mental health and spiritual health (anchor of health).  His resources on how to maintain good health are also three: Bible (for the principles = PROVEN HISTORY), SOP (Spirit of Prophecy = lifestyle of healthy people) and good science (agrees with the Bible and SOP).  Considering what health is, the reverse of that, disease, is the effort of nature to free the system from the conditions of the violation of the laws of health.  So, we break any of the three, and there is a good chance of getting sick.  And I became a good example of this during this week...

Tuesday (two weeks ago), I woke up with a sore throat that was also causing my ear to ache.  Usually by the time I have a sore throat, there isn't much I can do to stop the cold/flu symptoms from getting worse.  I started taking ibuprofen for the earache and zinc lozenges for my throat.  I knew it was just a matter of time before I got sick; I had been feeling a bit off starting my second week here but I kept ignoring the signs.  Throughout the day my sore throat and earache both got worse but I continued to go to class.  The warm honey lemon water helped some.  By Wednesday, I probably should have stayed in bed and just rested but I didn't want to miss class so...and lucky I did, maybe...

Wednesday was the day Nyse went over some natural ways to help with cold/flu symptoms.  He showed us what to do for sore throats and earaches and also blended for us "nature's penicillin".  Nature's penicillin is a concoction of multiple citrus fruits, onion, garlic, distilled water and peppermint oil.  We all got to sample a tablespoon but lucky me got to drink extra...so strong.  But hey, combined with sufficient rest, I felt a lot better the next day and my cold/flu stopped at the sore throat.  And I'm happy to report that none of the symptoms have returned.  

Here's my outreach partner Andrew, getting his throat wrapped with a (pretend) hot, wet towel, then a plastic bag and finally a scarf.

Lucky me got to try the onion "earphones" for ear infections.  The unlucky part was that for this demonstration, the onions were not baked as instructed so the smell was...yea, ode to onion.  Believe it or not, it did help alleviate some of the ache, and I only had them on for about 15-20 minutes.