A jar of hope

LUCINDA McDowell is one of my favorite authors. She wrote the books titled “Ordinary Graces” and “Dwelling Places,” among many others.

In one of her daily devotional entries from the first book, she compared our life to a mason jar filled with water. Let’s imagine putting stones one after the other onto the jar. Each stone corresponds to some inevitable trials that we face in life. A sick child. Misunderstanding with spouse. Financial problem. And so on and so forth.

What happens to the jar of water (our life) as the stones are dropped? They are displaced, and water overflows. Lucinda very aptly writes, “What’s inside is what comes out when life bombards us with one thing after another.”

St. Paul says in Romans 15:13, “May the God of hope fill you with joy and peace in faith, so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

What fills our lives? What overflows from inside out, when we are barraged with problems? Is it constant complaints? Impatience and irritation? Distraction and despair?

Lucinda invites us to be rooted and built up in Christ, be established in faith, and overflow with thanksgiving. (Colossians 2:7) “The water in the jar represents living vibrancy of daily deposits of communion with God through prayer and bible study – all those spiritual disciplines that go toward forming our own character rooted in the character of Christ.”