Powered by Love

Photo by Jim DiGritz on Unsplash

There’s a post going around Facebook the last few weeks that goes like this:

I love this analogy!!! ❤️ from a friend ☕️:

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? 🤔

“Well because someone bumped into me, of course!”🤷🏼‍♀️

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’s 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?💓

Or anger, bitterness, harsh words and reactions? 💣

You choose! 💯

Today let’s work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation; and kindness, gentleness and love for others.🙌🏻🙏🏻🙌🏻

And the first few times I read it, I let it slide off as the kind of harmless, feel-good post that I’m sure it was meant to be – because, let’s face it, I am in full agreement with the idea that what we have inside of us will come out when push comes to shove.

The problem is, I think this post may have a few underlying assumptions that could trip us up in getting to this great end point.

Very simply put, I hear people regularly taking this kind of thinking to mean that if we just tried harder we’d be able to change what was in our cup.

It suggests that it’s simply about mind over matter and thinking your way to a positive place.

But I’m convinced that to be able to fill our cups with all the good things in life – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control – we have to do more than simply try to pour them in on top of the other feelings.

That would be like adding tea into your cup of coffee! And although adding some hot chocolate to your coffee might be tasty, there are definitely some weird flavour combos I’d really rather not try!!!

I think if we really want to make sure that our mugs are sloshing over with the things we want in life, we are going to have to do the hard work of first cleaning out our cups. That coffee got there from somewhere. And in most cases, it keeps getting topped up because of something.

If we want to clean out our cup, we’re going to have to find out where the coffee’s coming from, turn off the source, and then clean out the mug – thoroughly – before we can really make a great cup of tea.

So … anyone want to do some dishes?