Words by our Priest-in-Charge:

There’s a Hole in My Bucket!

“You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” Jeremiah 29:13, ESV

On our recent family holiday we had many hours of fun on the beach, digging sandcastles, running in and out of the sea and so on. One day we discovered a couple of toy buckets in the house we were staying in, and we excitedly took these down to the beach so we could scoop water from the sea and fill up our sandcastle moat.

However, we soon discovered that both buckets had holes in them. Undeterred and with a stubborn enthusiasm for our task, we figured we would find a way to struggle on and complete our sandcastle mission. And thus ensued a fairly comical and creative time of plugging holes with fingers, filling the bucket half with sand first, blocking them with stones, holding buckets at funny angles, running fast, walking slowly … we tried everything. This went on for quite a while, and it eventually occurred to me that our focus had well and truly shifted from the original vision of filling the moat. Now it was about overcoming the holes. It wasn’t long before we got so distracted by the ‘hole issue’ that we forgot about the moat and made up new games to entertain ourselves with our holey buckets.

Whilst we still had plenty of fun, when the time came to go back to the house, Kyle commented “But our moat is still dry.”

How true this is of our lives. We have ‘holes in our buckets’, areas of our lives that we need to mend, things that can prevent us from fulfilling our destiny under God. Yet, we can get so fixated on overcoming these areas ourselves that we lose sight of what we were ever trying to accomplish in the first place. We can even find ourselves doing something completely different, having left behind the true destiny path we originally set out on.

Yet, unlike the buckets, there is hope for us! God is able to, and wants to heal, all of our ‘holes’. He has a plan and a destiny for each one of us’ and I don’t believe that for any of us that plan is to simply ‘get better’. This is not the end goal and shouldn’t be what our lives are fixated on. It would soon distract us from our true destiny.

Today’s Scripture reminds us that we need to seek Him with all of our hearts. Not to focus on ourselves or our healing, and not to focus on Him with only a part of ourselves, but all of us totally fixed on seeking Him. This is the only place where our true healing and fulfillment of our destiny can be found.

Prayer: Father God, I admit I have become distracted by my personal needs and may even have veered off that path of my true destiny under You. I choose today to fix my eyes on You, seek You with all of my heart and know that You will bring healing and fulfillment into my life. Amen.

Adapted from Seeds of the Kingdom, a free daily devotional by Ellel Ministries International