Pool or River

Is life draining away your strength? How can you stay full? And what if you don't want to just stay full; what if you want to overflow? #ChristianBlog

A few weeks ago, my husband noticed that our pool was continuing to get emptier. We add an automatic amount of water to our pool everyday and it was not keeping up. When he mentioned it to me, I was concerned. What if we had a leak? We do have a tree fairly close to the pool and I’ve heard horror stories of them cracking pools with their roots in the search for water. Not a pleasant prospect. Thankfully, it was just the suddenly increasing heat causing the rapid evaporation. 

We are all in constant need of filling. We can choose what we fill ourselves up with. We could fill ourselves with other people, accomplishments, pleasure, or a host of other possibilities. Those won’t satisfy us however – just read Ecclesiastes! There is only One that can fill us. 

We need this continual filling not so much because there’s something wrong with us (although that’s debatable), but because that’s just life. We get filled and life just evaporates back out of us. We need a steady diet. It isn’t enough to be filled occasionally; constant evaporation requires constant filling. 

But is just getting neatly refilled with what you’ve lost enough for you? It is not enough for me. Somehow I want more – more than daily refills, more than for myself, more than enough. 

I recently read the following quote by Wilbur Reece: 

“I would like to buy three dollars worth of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, But just enough to equal a cup of warm milk, or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of Him to make me love a black man, or pick beets with a migrant worker. I want ecstasy, not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy three pounds of God, please.” 

Oh the tragedy of being so content with so little – to feel full though you’ve not eaten, but barely unwrapped the packaging of God and tasted the surface! I want to gorge myself, to be filled to overflowing, to never be satisfied. Heaven forbid I ever become some anorexic, abstemious Christian pushing myself back from the feast laid before me having only licked a few delicacies and smelled a few of the Chef’s delights, daubing a napkin at the corners of my mouth and politely saying, “Oh, that’s enough. I know my limits. I have my girlish figure to consider!” Greedy? Yes, happily so. The very thought of being satisfied frightens me. 

I guess if I just wanted to maintain my level of fullness, there would be such a thing as “enough.” But “enough” is not for me. I want overflowing. Why? Because I have found a depth that is intoxicating and because I want more than just enough for me. If I were just trying to be a cute little swimming pool hidden away in a backyard, I wouldn’t want to overflow. But I want to be a river and carry what I’ve been given to others, to let them drink of the water that has filled me and get them hopelessly addicted to it. Oh God, pour it on! 

“They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.” Psalm 36:8-9

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