{"id":60924,"date":"2006-05-28T16:07:00","date_gmt":"2006-05-28T21:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/?p=60924"},"modified":"2023-05-28T16:09:16","modified_gmt":"2023-05-28T21:09:16","slug":"whats-in-your-bucket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lavistachurchofchrist.org\/cms\/whats-in-your-bucket\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in Your Bucket?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\t

by Wendi L. Capehart<\/p>\n

\"\"When I was a young mother of two children in diapers an older lady at church shared the bucket parable with me.\u00a0 The basic idea is that as you go through life, you are carrying a full bucket.\u00a0 And sometimes in your day-to-day life,\u00a0 you get bumped or jostled and this causes you to spill out some of the contents of your bucket, sometimes small spills, sometimes large.\u00a0 Sometimes you’ll just get a little splatter on yourself — drops so small and so quickly dried that nobody notices.\u00a0 Sometimes you splatter the contents of your bucket all over yourself and anybody else nearby.<\/p>\n

What is it that spills out of your bucket?<\/p>\n

It’s what you are carrying in your bucket in the first place<\/em>.\u00a0 Doesn’t that seem obvious?\u00a0 But we don’t think that way.\u00a0 We tend to blame the circumstances or people that ‘jostled’ us and made our buckets unsteady, unstable- but nobody else fills my bucket for me- I alone am responsible for the contents.\u00a0 Nobody else fills your bucket, either — you are the\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0person who decides the content of your bucket. Circumstances or people may trip you up a bit and make you drop the bucket (although even there, I think if we have a strong enough grip on the Father’s Hand as we walk through life, it won’t be that easy to trip us up) –\u00a0but you can’t spill something that isn’t in your bucket in the first place<\/strong>. If you filled your bucket with water, you won’t find vinegar sloshing out when you stumble over a rough path.<\/p>\n

In the same way, we go through life getting our buckets jostled about by other people and we say, “He makes me so mad,” and “I would be a patient mother if your children would just….”\u00a0 and “I never would have been so rude if she hadn’t….”<\/p>\n

But other people don’t fill our buckets.\u00a0 They just bump us around and jostle us, as we do them.\u00a0 We can only spill out what we\u00a0already have<\/em>\u00a0inside our buckets.\u00a0 If all you have in your bucket is the milk of human kindness, vitriol is not what you should see splashing out when you’re crossing over a bumpy place.<\/p>\n

If we fill our buckets with the milk of human kindness, we won’t find that the vinegar of spite or the hot sauce of rage is what sloshes out of that bucket when we go over the rough spots of life.\u00a0 If we fill our buckets from the source of Living Water, we shouldn’t be finding that they splash speech that tears down instead of building up on others when we stumble through a rough patch.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to only show the best bucket contents to people we like and to people who pretty much give us our own way.\u00a0 They don’t bump us about and we don’t spill our buckets on them.\u00a0 We think that smooth sailing is somehow due to some virtue in our own character, when, in fact, we just aren’t being challenged.<\/p>\n

Contrariwise, it’s easy to perceive the people we don’t like through a lens designed to show them in their worst light, and then blame them for the nastiness that spills out of our buckets when we are around them.\u00a0 But those who rub us the wrong way are the very people who can do the most to teach us how to turn sour lemon juice into sweet, refreshing lemonade.\u00a0 If we look at it the right way, they show us just where the weak spots in our buckets need patching up.\u00a0 Being irritated by somebody may just be the best opportunity to practice careful and judicious bucket mending and carrying, and to examine what it is we’ve put in our buckets in the first place- because, again, nobody can ‘make’ you spill something out of your bucket\u00a0that wasn’t there in the first place<\/em>.<\/p>\n