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[blockquote cite=”Tom Rath & Donald O. Clifton” type=”left, center, right”]Spiraling downward isn’t hard to do when your bucket is being emptied.[/blockquote]

Looking back, I realize now that I spent more than a year spiraling downward. One of my best friends had not only dipped out of my bucket with her negative criticism of me, but she also succeeded in kicking my bucket right over. The sobering truth is that I not only let her do it, I didn’t even attempt to stand my bucket back up.

I just finished a little book, entitled How Full is Your Bucket? The premise is that everybody has an invisible bucket and that we are at our best when our buckets are overflowing – and at our worst when they are empty. Everyone also has an invisible dipper. In each interaction, we can use our dipper either to fill or dip from other’s buckets. After reading this book, I realized it was a good analogy to describe what had happened to me.

As my bucket drained, I was definitely at my worst in terms of how I felt about myself and in terms of giving up on my lifelong dreams. Not only did I let this friend dip from my bucket in my literal interactions with her, I let her words tumble around and take a bitter root in my brain when I was all alone, like while I was taking a shower. I began to not care about what had so mattered to me in the past, and I didn’t even care that I didn’t care. It was the first time in my life I had experienced apathy.

About one and a half years later, I felt God nudging me to be vulnerable and ask a leader at my church to pray for me. I confessed I had lost my passion for life and that I didn’t know how to get it back. She prayed that God would take me back to the sacred roots of my dreams and restore my zest for life. It was at that moment that I believe God wiped up the floor, grasped the handle of my bucket and set it upright once again.

Over the course of the next couple of months, God Himself used His gracious and miraculous dipper to fill my bucket back up. I had been wounded in three specific areas and God used three separate incidents to speak truth into my life. I could finally see the water sloshing around in my bucket once more. And, that felt great. Because not only was I not spiraling downward any longer, I was able to begin healing. I was able to share my story. And, now, hopefully, I can use my dipper to fill the precious buckets around me.

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photo(s) courtesy of Stock.XCHNG (http://www.sxc.hu)

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