Boxes and Buckets

Imagine you are faced with a problem that seems so big that it is impossible for you to handle.  If you try to look at the whole thing, you mind just recoils from the size of it.  It is too big for you to handle, so what do you do?  You break it up.  You find some small piece of the problem that you can handle, and start there.  You work on small piece after small piece, and slowly you whittle impossibly big problem into smaller ones.  

   Now, this won’t work for every problem, but it is more of an illustration of how people deal with large and difficult problems without it overwhelming us.  Generally speaking, this is how we deal with understanding God as well.  We say that God is infinite, but really that is just another way of saying really, really big.  God is too vast for us to comprehend as a whole, so we break him up into pieces we can deal with.  Then, we take these pieces and put them into neat little categories or “boxes”.  Into this box goes the “All Just God”, into that box goes the “All Loving God”, over there we have the “Holy God” and so on.

   This is what we mean when we talk about putting God into a box.  The problem is that by putting God into a box, we lose sight of the whole of who God is.  Rather than pursuing God, we are taking little pieces of God and turning those pieces into idols.  More importantly, by putting God into little boxes in our lives we are, in a fashion, cutting ourselves off from the whole of who God is, and all that he has in store for us.  

   So, here we are in an impossible situation.  God is simply too great for us to comprehend, and trying to break the problem up into smaller problems will invariably fail.  What then is the solution?  Imagine you have a bucket, and your job is to gather rain.  You take your bucket and you move around trying to catch as much rain as possible.  You see a spot where it seems the rain is heavier, so you move there.  When you get there, you see another spot that looks heavier, so you move again.  You spend so much time and energy chasing the rain, but surely there is a better way.  Maybe you need a bigger bucket.

   The reality is that we are the buckets, and the rain is everything that God has for us.  We spend so much time and energy chasing the rain, but if we stop chasing the rain, then our water drains out, and we have nothing.  The solution is to become a bigger bucket, but think about that for a second.  The process of reshaping a bucket to make it larger is going to be downright painful for the bucket.  As you grow in your understanding of who God is, you will be able to catch more and more of the rain that he has for you.  You will see more and more of His love, patience, justice, and kindness at work in the world.  The process of growing in Christ is often uncomfortable and painful, but as long as we cling to our little “Boxes of God”, we will never be able to catch the full measure of all Jesus has for us.

   “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:17-19