La Palma Girl

Living Water.

Water has been on my mind a lot lately for several reasons. I'm fairly certain that I haven't been drinking enough of it and have been borderlined dehydrated for several days. Tonight I poured myself a giant glass of water and it was so refreshing. Much better than a bag of soda.


Last week, our water stopped working on Wednesday. Thursday it came back long enough for a quick shower, and then stopped again. It returned Saturday and has stayed on until tonight, when it shut off again. We aren't exactly sure what is causing the water issue but we are hoping to get it fixed quickly.

Friday, in the middle of our water crisis, I kept thinking of the Accapella song, "Living Water." Specifically the part where the child sings, "Give me water from the well that never runs dry and I will thirst no more." I started studying the story of the women at the well. She asks Jesus to give her this "living water." so that she will never again be thirsty again. I can relate to being thirsty and I can relate to the woman at the well. What concerns me much more than my physical dehydration is my spiritual dehydration. Friday evenings we have a womans class. Typically, we study one woman a week from the Bible and discuss her story. When we were told to open our Bibles to Juan 4, I knew exactly what women we were going to be looking at. The woman at the well.

Tonight, I'm studying a Beth Moore book, trying to work on this spiritual dehydration, when I get the call about the water being off again. After realizing theres nothing we can do tonight, I came back to the study. Beth Moore takes me to Psalm 63. The first verse of this psalm says, "Oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water."

Here in La Palma, we meet as a church every day but Saturday. We are always coming together and encouraging one another. Sometimes though its easy to get caught up in the work and miss out on the relationship with God. It would be easy to focus on the differences in culture, what I do or don't have here, and the other insignificant details. I don't want to spend a year here and leave feeling like I majored in Bible with going to classes night after night. I want to build a genuine relationship with my God. A thirst for His word and for a relationship with Him.

Please pray for me as I try not to drown in the details but to instead drink in the richness of God.

Todays blog is all about super heros.
A few weeks ago, one of my second grade students ran off of the playground. If you know anything about second graders, you know this is highly unusual. So I went to the classroom to check on him. He was starting to cry, so I asked if he was hurt. He said he wasnt. I asked if everything was ok and what had happened. He started sobbing and saying something very fast in Spanish. I have no idea what happened that day on the play ground, but I held him until he stopped crying. Afterwards he was so thankful that someone had payed attention to him and noticed him on his bad day that he gave me this:

It is handmade of construction paper and appears to be wearing a cape. When he ran up to me with a huge grin on his face and delievered me a handmade super hero? Thats exactly how I felt. Like a super hero.

This week in my other English classes, we've been talking about what special powers we would have if we were super heros. I had them write "If I was a super hero, I would...." My class yesterday participated and were a little creative. My class today was not creative at all. Out of five students, only one person even wrote anything. So we had to use my super hero as an example. If I was a super hero, I would make it rain cake. I would have a Patience Wand that could bless people with more patience and I would have a peace gun that would shoot peace at people. My class thought I was crazy. Heres the picture of Super Teresa and all of her cake:

Ok, so maybe my students are right. Im a little crazy and lacking in artistic ability. I asked if they had ever heard of the movie or book "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." I would really like to have both. If I had the book, we could read it a page at a time, discuss sentence struture, and vocabulary. It doesn't matter to me whether its the new edition or the classic edition. Also, I would really like to get all of my students together and have an English movie night. This movie would be perfect. The characters dont have thick accents making it fairly easy to understand. Also, it has so many different types of food, I think seeing gigantic pancakes landing on schools will help them remember their vocabulary. Also, it might help to spark some of their imagination. Because, really, whats the point of being a kid without imagination?

If anyone coming on the September trip has room to pack a DVD and a childrens book, I'd GREATLY appreciate it and even reimburse you for the costs. (not the cost of flying, just the cost of the movie and book) :)

This is a quote my brother found for me. I feel its appropriate for this blog:

"I am fairly certain that given a cape and a tiara, I could save the world."

And an even more relevant quotes:

"I can do all things through Him who stregthens me." Philippians 4:13

"...if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." Matthew 17:20

Miss you all and God Bless,

Teresa