Craving water and creative teaching

I pretty much never drank water until college. My friend Kesley, and my mom, always got on to me saying that I really needed to drink water, but I just didn't like it. Once I started drinking water consistantly, I began to need it more. I get thirsty for water more. It was difficult in Kenya when we could only have about two water bottles a day or so, because I wanted more than that! And we couldn't drink their water!

You know those times when you're REALLY thirsty? When that happens to me and I'm not at home, I realized (finally) that a thought runs through my head - "I'm thirsty, I want soda / juice, or ice cream / smoothies / slushies sound really good right now!" Sometimes I go and get those. But other times I know it's just that I'm really thirsty for water, and those other things don't really quench my thirst like water does. Now that I'm aware of it, I'm more careful not to go get those things. Because once I have water, the strong want for those other things are gone.

Jesus is living water!!! Maybe he made this analogy becuase it's the same thing with us physically, like I just described. When we begin to spend more times with God, we desire Him more. And sometimes we desire Him and are hurting or seeking freedom from something and instead turn to other people, fun things that waste our time, alcohol, and a million other things. They never quench our thirst for Him though, so we run around saying, "Hmm, this was supposed to make me happy, it was supposed to give me peace, and I still  dont' have it."

On a different note, yesterday in my math class we had to present different learning styles of one type of information. We had to show 5 different oil spills in the past 10 years - where, when, and how much. Our group got "graph" and I wasn't thrilled to have to make a graph. I jokingly said, "We should make a HUMAN graph and make them BE the graph!" but another girl in my group was like, "Yeah!!" and as we talked about it we decided to do it. The other three were like, "No, that's weird." But we kept pushing it until they agreed. Each person was 100,000 gallons of oil that was spilled, and they had to help figure out how many people went on each part (ex - 300,000 gallons spilled should be 3 people), and then we talked about how you could ask questions such as which one had the most or least spills, how much more / less did one spill have compared to another, etc. The teacher liked it. Yay!

I realized I am often like that - I try to be really creative. We'll see how that works out in teaching.... sometimes the ideas just don't come, or it's too complicated to actually do. But I really hope that I am able to make my class in the future more fun than normal.