The Empty Bucket

Drop, drop….drop! On December 31st at 11:59 pm, one last drop filled your bucket to the brim. Not one more drop could fit.  No time was left. Nothing could be drained out, replaced, changed, or fixed. As the clock struck 12:00 am, your year was done and you were left with a completely filled bucket. A finished year.

Reflecting into the full vastness of the bucket, the combined swirling drops of different experiences, interactions, and relationships. What do you see? Are you pleased with how your bucket was filled? Do you see drops of happiness, sadness, love, challenges, blessings, or drops of faith? Do you see stressed and broken relationships or healed and restored ones? Drops of wise choices or misguided actions and judgments?

Maybe you had a great year. You accomplished personal goals, learned some new things, and you were a good, decent person.  Store and treasure those things in your heart. Build on the good work that has been started in you.

Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6

Maybe your year was anything but great! Maybe it was a year full of disappointments, regrets, hard decisions, instability, loss, too many shattered dreams and lost hope. Maybe it was a year you wish not to repeat.

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.  Isaiah 43:18-19  

Out with the old and in with the new.

It’s a new year. You have a new bucket. A shiny new bucket. A bucket waiting to be filled up one drop at a time by future experiences, interactions, and reactions.

What are you going to start to fill your bucket with? Will it be a bunch of resolutions? Most of which end up being things that we have to do and do not accomplish. Or should we fill our bucket up with revelations? Revelations that include pleasant, enlightening surprises, and noticing the divine interventions in our every day life.

When January 1, 2017 comes along and you are looking into the full, deep bucket of 2016, I hope that you will see more revelations than half-completed resolutions. I hope that they are the types of revelations that have caused you to shift your perspective, stretch and grow you. I hope that you will find strong currents among the filling drops which will include good relationships, hope, joy, peace, and love.

For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Isaiah 55:12 

Do you have a spiritual focus for the new year? A focus word for 2016? I would love to hear from you.