Maybe you’re familiar with the anti-bullying curriculum that encourages kids to be bucket fillers instead of bucket dippers. The idea is that our choices each day either add to the good things in someone else’s bucket, or they take away from them by our hurtful actions and unkind words. While I appreciate the character qualities, there’s just one problem – I don’t want to carry a bucket. The burdens of life are heavy enough. I don’t need anything else to lug around.
Carrying around a bucket makes it a lot more likely that I’m going to live with the expectation that life, and other people, owe me something. But you don’t have to live very long before you run smack into the reality that life feels very little obligation to you. Instead, life places a lot of demands on you. What if that’s actually the point? Not that life should fill us up, but that we should pour ourselves out into life.
There’s another problem with a bucket. Actually the problem is more me. More often than not my tendency is to peer into my bucket and decide that it’s not full enough. I feel a lack more often than I feel the fullness. There’s something about these buckets of ours that makes their emptiness weigh far more than that which fills them. So our blessings quickly become light as air, while the empty space weighs heavily on our hearts.
I’m afraid it’s also human nature to spend an awful lot of time peeking at other people’s buckets and deciding theirs are fuller than our own. And that just multiplies the weight of the emptiness and divides the joy we have in what our buckets already contain.
What if instead of trying to fill a bucket, we choose to live in the freedom of fullness? When you are filled to the brim with the enoughness of Christ, you are already full. There’s nothing to carry around in the hopes of filling it. There are no unmet needs, no unfilled obligations. Anything that is added simply causes to you overflow.
At the Cross, we can exchange our rusty buckets for the Cup. The Cross, where Christ gave us His everything and met our every need – past, present, and future. The Cup, which held His blood that was poured out as a confirmation that God’s love is an everlasting, do-whatever-it-takes kind of love.
Now when we come to the Cross, we come to the fountain of living water – Christ Himself – and we are cups. He fills us completely with His complete fullness. Then we offer the fullness that is in us to others – in the same way that Christ took the Cup and offered it to His disciples during the Last Supper.
Our capacity is tiny compared to the fullness of God. We can’t possibly hold all that He gives us. And still He pours into us continually, more than we can hold. The only way to relieve the pressure is to be poured out. We will never run empty because Christ is an eternal spring that will constantly renew, refill, and refresh us as we overflow His goodness into life around us.
I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. Matthew 25:35