filling the cup

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are all dead.

                                Oscar Wilde

 

You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere. Why did you spill the coffee? "Because someone bumped into me!" Wrong answer. You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out. Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which will happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It is easy to fake it, until you get rattled. So, we have to ask ourselves “what's in my cup?" When life gets tough, what spills over? Joy, gratefulness, peace, and humility? Anger, bitterness, harsh words and reactions? Life provides the cup; you choose how to fill it. Today let's work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation, and kindness, gentleness and love for others.

                               Friend of a friend

 

Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them

                               Jesus (Mark 7)

 

First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

                               Jesus (Matthew 23)

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If you want to know how you are doing spiritually, stub your toe

 

What comes out of your mouth?

 

You all know what I am talking about

 

If you want to know how you are doing spiritually, look at how you respond

to the tough things in life,

 

along comes Covid

along comes financial distress

along comes a person who is a different color, or one who speaks a different language

along comes a person who spouts hate

along comes an injustice

 

bump!

CRASH!!!

 

we are shaken

what comes out?

 

Fear?

Hate?

Compassion?

Anger?

Generosity?

 

Do we respond to hate with hate, or with love?

Do we respond to want by hording, or by giving?

Do we turn our backs on the pain and suffering, or do we enter into it,

and respond to it with compassion?

 

How we respond is determined (and reveals) what is inside our “cup”

what fills our heart

 

I would like to believe, I would like to say

that as a person connected to the sacred, like a branch to the vine

I am filled with Sacred (the Spirit)

and that I would respond in a Sacred manner to those things that come my way

 

but alas

too often I respond with anger (there is a place for anger, but it must be anger transformed by the Spirit into redemptive anger – deep topic)

 

or fear

 

sometimes I suddenly find harsh words spilling forth

sometimes I find myself turning my back on the pain

or withholding love

 

Right now life is tough

I am appalled by the lies

By the disdain for human life

By the greed, and racism, and abuse of power

 

I see such awful things oozing forth from those with power

and all of the ugliness trickling down

seeping through the cracks in our souls

infecting all of us

 

until what spills out of us

do not honor God

 

I so need to take the time to stop

to breathe

to center

to connect with all that is Sacred

 

to let Love (God) fill my heart

to let love grow in my heart

to let love flow from my heart

 

so that when life gets tough

I am not piling pain on pain

but instead am there

with calmness, and love

 

nurturing peace and reconciliation

 

Life provides the cup; we choose how to fill it.

Today let's work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy,

So that what spills forth from us

 

Are words of affirmation,

and kindness, gentleness

and love