Is There a Hole In Your Bucket?

When my husband was growing up he had a reputation with his family members for never, ever, getting mad. I used to feel really badly about this, because they've never seen him mad, but I'd seen him angry many times in just our first year of marriage (I will note that I knew he was angry because I knew him so well. Few other people recognize when he's really annoyed). Than one day I asked him if anybody had ever crossed him as a child. He said no, nobody ever did, and neither was he ever held accountable for anything. In addition, of course, he batted about between a couple family members, and never lived with his dad long enough to feel safe enough to get mad. Hm.

When I was a young mother of two in diapers an older lady at church shared the bucket parable with me. The basic idea is that if you are carrying a full bucket, sometimes you get bumped or jostled and this causes spills. But you won't spill something that isn't in your bucket in the first place. If you're carrying milk, you won't find that vinegar sloshes out of your bucket when you go over rough spot.
In the same way, we go through life getting our buckets by other people and we say, "He makes me so mad," and "I would be a patient mother if you children would just...." and "I never would have been so rude if she hadn't...."
But other people don't fill our buckets. They just bump us around and jostle us, as do them. We can only spill out what we already have inside our buckets. If all you have in your bucket is the milk of human kindness, vitriol is not what you should see splashing out when you're crossing over a bumpy place.
Hmmm.

Recently an acquaintance asked me about homeschooling. One of her concerns was, she said, that she brought out the worst in her children- they were crankier, ruder, and showed more unpleasant character traits to her than to anybody else. Hmmmmmmm.

Suddenly a few years of thoughts and ideas crashed together and I thought, "You know what? I think we are supposed to bring out the worst in our children. We're supposed to bring out the best, too, but if you never see the nasty stuff inside their buckets, you don't know what needs to be addressed."

It's easy to only show the best bucket contents to people we don't live with 24 and 7. Those are the people we love, who love us, and we feel comfortable enough around them to be a bit free with our buckets. Those are the people who can do the most to teach us how to turn the sour lemon juice into sweet, refreshing lemonade. They show up just where the weak spots in our buckets need patching up. Being irritated by your family members may just be the best opportunities to practice careful and judicious bucket mending and carrying.

It's best, of course, that our children are not rude, sneaky, disobedient, or disagreeable anywhere. But if they are going to be rude somewhere, it had best be at home where you can help them fix it. It's also best that we be none of these things.

Of course, that means that you have to see your job as one including training, example, discipling, help, encouragment, and participation. Parenting isn't meant to be a spectator sport. Neither is character development.

There are an awful lot of holes in my bucket. How about you?