photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/val-er-ie/14343350693

These days are full.  My desk holds more piles of tasks and needs than I can tackle in a lifetime, nevertheless in 30 hours each week.  My children hold more needs for their own flourishing than I could ever provide them, even if I quit my job and gave each hour to the labor of mothering.  My grandfather lies in a hospice bed an hour away.  His sons wait upon him as he approaches his final hours.  They watch his fragile frame and listen to his breathing.  He holds more needs than his body can fulfill any longer, even if the drugs and the care continued.

There are limits to who we are and what we can do. 

It all feels too much at times – my cup runneth over.  The form of the cup is static and finite. It does not expand to fit the need. It holds steady.  No amount of persisting, praying, or penance will change its form.  There are only 24 hours in the day. There are only so many of them that one can stay awake.  There is a finitude and a finality that cannot be adjusted.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who practice it have a good understanding. God’s praise endures forever.” – Psalm 111:10

An understanding mind is one who practices reverence and obedience to these twin realities: human finitude and divine infinitude. Human limitations are not the tragedy that I feel them to be, for they are not the end of the story.

The cup is not the story.  The story is the life source that flows into our human days. This life source flows continuously, unabashed by the ways that the cup cannot hold it all. The limits of the cup do not cause the Creator to turn off the faucet to not “waste” this life on our limited frame.

My cup overflows.

The human frame, the 24 hours, the mortal life will never achieve the glorious splendor it assumes it can create.  The cup is not what demands my reverence, adoration, and devotion.  It is the Holy One who beckons those responses. It is the abundant, extravagant generosity of the Holy One which is the glorious splendor which my soul tastes.

It is the Holy One who creates life which eternally pours forth, dripping and splashing over the static forms which cannot ever contain it all.

It is the Holy One who saves my finite form through the healing and redeeming of my tragic disappointment in my very self – more breakable and fragile than I would prefer.

It is the Holy One who sweeps through, in, over, and under my limited days and my mortal flesh to remind me of the eternal fountain which over me pours all the eternal life that I desire deep down in my breakable bones.

My gaze shifts from cup to overflowing contents.

I have obsessed too long with my hands, assuming I can labor my way to glory.  Glory may come with the work of my hands, but my hands will not be the originator and the source.

My cup overflows.

Miraculously, God loves this cup. God does not resent its limits. God sees it as beautiful in its capacity to hold the most beautiful gift that comes – life and its beauty, love and its enduring, passion and its redeeming.

My cup overflows.

My cup overflows.

My cup overflows.

I pause and give thanks, drenched in gratitude and praise, reverence and adoration, devotion and commitment.  Thanks be to God.