Bottom-of-the-Bucket Moments– by Eliezer Gonzalez
Dec 28, 2015 3325
If you have a bucket with several holes, the water level in the bucket will never be higher than the lowest hole. If you want your bucket to carry more water, you don’t fix it by putting a lid on it; you fix it by fixing the lowest hole.
The same is true of our lives. Like leaky buckets, the reality of our lives is that each one of us leaks through many holes. The things that drag us down, ruin our relationships, and take us away from God are not the things at the top of the bucket, but the things at the bottom; not us at our best, but us at our worst moments.
You know these bottom-of-the-bucket moments: they are the times where you explode in your anger against a loved one; they are the times when you belittle another person. Or they could be the times when you sit in the self-absorbed loneliness of your own misery; when you are unable to forgive yourself; or when you allow yourself to be used and abused by others. They might be the times when you wallow in sin and hate yourself for it.
Bottom-of-the-bucket moments might be different for all of us, but we all have them. It’s true that we tend to spend most of our self-improvement efforts on the issues nearer to the top of the bucket than the bottom, isn’t it?
But for too many people it is that lowest common denominator that defines who they are. And if you are honest about it, is a sad truth that it is those bottom-of-the-bucket moments that cause you the most pain in your life.
The most common and most useless way to deal with a hole at the bottom of the bucket of your life is to blame others. While it might feel good at the time, this does nothing to fix the hole in the bucket of your life. And its not someone else’s bucket – it’s your bucket that needs fixing!
To allow your life-bucket to leak and not do anything about it, and in many cases not even admit it, is a sure recipe for disaster. But how do we stop these moments from defining our relationships with others, and from defining how we see ourselves? How do we fix our leaky buckets?
There is only one way; by giving God the leaky bucket of our lives, and every time we spring a leak, to acknowledge it in humility and confession of our sin. By doing this, we allow God’s great healing work to begin. I have discovered that the secret to power in Christian living is humble surrender to God. If, next time we spring a leak, we confess our weaknesses and heartbreak to God and to those we have harmed, we will find that God has a way of making old buckets new again.
God has ways of fixing the leaky buckets of our lives that we will never understand. But unless we give Him our buckets, He will never be able to fix them.
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed – James 5:16.
– Eliezer Gonzalez
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