Do you have a spiritual bucket with a hole in it?
Recently, I was talking to a friend, whom I hadn’t seen for several years. He mentioned someone he’d been trying to help, but all his efforts felt like pouring water into a bucket with a hole. It seemed he was getting nowhere.
This metaphor of a leaking bucket actually helped him realize something had to change before he could actually help the person.
In this particular case, the hole was that this person did not feel loved by God. As a result, they couldn’t hold on to all the good coming their way and all the love my friend was showing them.
In other words, there was nothing wrong with the water he had been pouring in to the person’s bucket, to use that metaphor. All the helpful ideas, encouragement, and love were good and powerful. The person just couldn’t hold onto them, couldn’t accept them.
The focus of my friend’s prayers and efforts became less about trying to solve the person’s problems and more about helping them just feel God’s love. Once that person started to feel God’s love, solutions to the problems came naturally.
Are you trying to fill a bucket with a hole?
I love this metaphor of trying to fill a bucket with a hole. It’s one thing, with an actual bucket, when you can see the hole and know it needs to be repaired. But it’s another thing altogether when the bucket with a hole is a metaphor for something missing in your life, in your thinking, in your heart, and you don’t realize it.
The more I’ve thought about this bucket with a hole metaphor, I’ve realized I have had a very similar experience a couple of times.
Years ago, in my first job out of college, I met a woman who was old enough to be my mother. She was kind and thoughtful in so many ways, but she just didn’t feel loved. Her father had committed suicide years before and she had never gotten over it. She blamed herself and to make things worse, she never really felt like her dad had loved her.
I, along with many others, expressed a lot of love to her in many different and very tangible ways, and she responded in the moment with gratitude. But she couldn’t seem to hold on to feeling she was loved.
You could tell her how much God loved her and she would be comforted for a little while, but then she fell back into her attitude of not feeling loved.
She had a bucket with a hole
Basically, her bucket had a hole in it. She had a hard time holding on to all the love that had been expressed.
I talked a lot to her about how much God loved her. And gradually she came to feel a little bit of God’s love here and there, and that made a big difference in her life. After I moved away several years later, we kept in touch for a while and she was much more settled.
The second experience, that was very similar, happened when I moved back to my home town. I met an elderly lady who never had felt loved. She had been the sixth or seventh child in her family and her father had wanted her to be a boy. Because she was a girl, her dad practically ignored her and she spent all her time trying to get her dad to love her. But she was never quite successful.
After he passed on, she felt even more unloved. When I met her years after that, she still felt unloved. I spent some time with her trying to help her feel God’s love. It wasn’t really like pouring water in a bucket with a hole. It was more like pouring water through a sieve.
Honestly, it felt like there were times I had poured out an Atlantic Ocean worth of love. But five minutes later, it made no difference.
She never realized she had a bucket with a hole
Unfortunately, I don’t think she ever really understood this problem in a way that she could face it and resolve it. She never realized she had a bucket with a hole in it. And she always wanted more love.
I was in my mid 20s at the time and if I knew then what I know now, I would have tried to help her in a very different way. I thought at the time, by expressing love, she would see that love, accept it and hold onto it. But that never happened.
Who knows what I would say to her now, but I think I’d focus more on helping her see her worth in God’s eyes and finding ways for her to discover and experience God’s love for her.
This idea of pouring water, or love in this case, into a bucket with a hole, a heart that doesn’t feel loved, has got me to thinking. What does the Bible have to say about all this?
Broken cisterns hold no water
God said to the prophet Jeremiah,
For My people have committed two evils:
They have abandoned Me,
The fountain of living waters,
To carve out for themselves cisterns,
Broken cisterns
That do not hold water. Jeremiah 2:13 NASB20
Imagine a giant cistern in the ground designed to hold gallons and gallons of water. If the cistern had a crack in it, the water, obviously, would drain away.
In this case the Children of Israel had perhaps held on to some of the things God had told them, but they were not faithful to all His commandments. There were cracks in their obedience to God. Their cisterns, like a bucket with a hole, could not hold the water of God’s love and protection.
For the Children of Israel, to mend those broken cisterns would have meant full obedience to God. Nothing else could have repaired those cracks. Here, those cracks are a metaphor for disobedience to God.
Do you have a bucket with a hole?
Is there a bucket with a hole in your life? Is there something that seems to drain away all the good, all the love, all the beauty and purposefulness of your life? The problem is not that you don’t have good, love, beauty, and purpose in your life. There’s a gap somewhere that prevents you from holding on to it.
The hole in your bucket could be any variety of things. Feeling unloved, as we’ve talked about, guilt and shame over something you did or something others did to you, a sense of unworthiness I could be pride or just plain old fear, with one of its many masks.
But sometimes we hide these things away in our hearts and don’t realize they’re there and that they’re affecting the way we receive and hold on to God’s love, and all the good that’s coming our way. The trick is figuring out that you have a hole, and what it is. And then of course, how to repair it.
How to find the hole when you can’t see it
Once, many years ago, a farmer asked his daughter to help him with milking the cows and then pouting the milk in shallow metal pans so the cream could rise the surface and be skimmed off. Unfortunately, one of these pans had a leak. But when they were all cleaned up the hole was so small, she couldn’t see where it was and she had forgot to mark which pan it was.
Her dad simply suggested she hold each pan up to the sunlight. When she held up the pan with the hole, a tiny pinprick of light came through the pan and she knew exactly where the pan needed to be repaired. She showed her dad and he soldered the hole closed.
The lesson the daughter remembered was that when you have a problem in life, don’t try to figure things out on your own. Hold the problem up to the light of God’s love, power, and truth. That will help you see where and what the real problem is and then you can focus on solving it.
If the farmer had just kept using a cream skimming pan that leaked, the hole might eventually have gotten bigger, made a bigger mess every time he used it, and perhaps even gone beyond repair.
Fix the hole first, then fill your bucket
If you have a bucket with a hole in your life, something that keeps you from making progress, or a problem that seems to never be solved, catch it when the hole is little if you can. Sometimes you need to quit praying to solve the problem itself and pray to see what the hole in your bucket is, so to speak.
Is there any fear, guilt, shame, pride, a sense of unworthiness, or anything else that’s acting like a hole in a bucket? Then deal with that. Pray to heal that.
Jesus sometimes took this approach when he healed someone.
Remember the story of those four fellows who brought their friend to Jesus on a pallet, climbed up on the roof where Jesus was preaching, took away some the roof, and lowered their friend down into the room where Jesus was.
Before Jesus healed the man, he did something else first. There were things that needed to be dealt with before the man was healed physically.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” Luke 5:20 NIV
Jesus repaired the hole first
Jesus discerned something in this man’s heart, perhaps a sense of guilt for sins he had committed but didn’t feel forgiveness for.
That burden of guilt in this man’s heart was like a bucket with a hole. Jesus mended the hole with forgiveness before he filled the man’s bucket with healing.
If the man had continued to feel unforgiven, he might not have felt worthy to be healed. But Jesus knew exactly what needed to happen.
There was another bucket with a hole, to continue with this metaphor. It was the collective bucket of the Pharisee’s limited and judgmental thinking. But Jesus held their thinking up to the light of God, like the farmer’s daughter held up the cream tray to the sunlight, and clarified that as the Son of God, he could forgive sins.
The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”
Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. Luke 5:21-25 NIV
Jesus repaired the hole in the bucket of the crippled man and he also plugged at least one of the many holes in the Pharisees’ bucket of thoughts.
Then, the lame man was quickly healed because guilt and unforgiven sin were no longer draining away God’s healing love.
A dad’s bucket with a hole
A similar thing happened when the father of a young boy, who was having seizures, came to Jesus to heal his son. Jesus said to him,
“Everything is possible for one who believes.”
Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” Mark 9:23, 24 NIV
The father had faith his son could be healed. He went to Jesus’s disciples and asked them to heal the boy. But they hadn’t been able to.
When Jesus said: Everything is possible for one who believes, he was holding up the problem to the light of God’s love and power. Then the hole appeared: the father’s doubts and fears became obvious. Jesus repaired the hole, the father’s doubts and fears, and healed the boy all at the same time.
This has been a really helpful metaphor as I’ve asked myself: Do I have a bucket with a hole? Is there anything in my heart that’s letting God’s love and healing power leak out? Over the years there have been lots of holes like pride, fear, guilt, unworthiness, unrepented of sin, selfishness, self-righteousness, just to name a few.
Detecting and repairing the holes
Some of these holes are easier to detect and repair than others. And sometimes they reappear because they weren’t completely dealt with. But over many years, I’ve been facing these mental attitudes that have prevented healing and resolution of my problems. And there has been some beautiful progress along the way.
You may have been pouring in lots of water, lots of prayer and love, into your bucket with a hole and wondered why you weren’t healed or why your problem hasn’t been solved. It doesn’t mean your prayers are no good. It doesn’t mean God has forgotten and neglected you, or decided not to heal you. It doesn’t mean God no longer loves you.
There’s nothing wrong with the water you’re pouring in your bucket. It could simply mean you have a bucket with a hole in it.
I encourage you to take an honest look at what the hole in your metaphorical bucket might be and focus your prayers on that.
The bucket with a hole metaphor only goes so far
This metaphor of a bucket with a hole has been very helpful, but a metaphor is never perfect and can only go so far to explain the infinite nature of God’s love and healing power.
As I’ve been pondering the deeper implications of this metaphor, I suddenly had a mental image of a bucket with a hole and a bucket without a hole, both submerged in the ocean. There was water in the buckets and all around the outside of the buckets.
It didn’t really matter if there was a hole in the bucket in this case, because the water is everywhere. In fact, the bucket and the hole become almost irrelevant here.
God says to Jeremiah:
“Do not I fill heaven and earth?” declares the LORD. Jeremiah 23:24 NIV
When you become aware that God fills “heaven and earth,” fills all space, there’s no longer a bucket that you have to fill or repair.
When you realize you are in the infinite ocean of God’s love, the omnipresence of God’s healing power, you no longer need or have a bucket. You have all God’s love with you at all times, inside and outside of you.
In God’s infinite love, there is no bucket with a hole
And there is no plug to pull, no hole possible in this infinite omnipresence we call God. A bucket is a limited, finite form with an inside and outside. God is infinite with no outside. There’s no place for God to be drained into. He’s already everywhere.
Just think about what it means to be immersed in an infinite ocean of God’s love. This is what’s really going on right now. You are in the presence of God. There is no limit to God’s infinity. It can’t be drained away. His love is in you, and all around you. There’s no way for you to leave or be removed from this infinite, omnipresence of God’s love.
When you realize you’re in this infinite ocean of God’s love, you’ve outgrown the metaphor of a bucket with a hole.
Now, the bucket with a hole metaphor can be very helpful and it’s a good starting place to get a better sense of what might be preventing a healing or a solution to a problem.
Whatever it is that appears to prevent healing, in the infinite love of God, no fear, guilt, sin, unworthiness, or not feeling loved, can create a hole that drains away God’s love and healing power. You do not have a bucket with a hole. You are in and surrounded by the presence of infinite divine Love, inside and out.
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James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and church mentor. He conducts Bible workshops online and in person. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by learning to think, pray, and love like Jesus. Contact him here.
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Bible References
Jeremiah 2:13 NASB20
13 For My people have committed two evils:
They have abandoned Me,
The fountain of living waters,
To carve out for themselves cisterns,
Broken cisterns
That do not hold water.
Luke 5:20 NIV
20 When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”
Luke 5:21-25 NIV
21 The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
22 Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts?
23 Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?
24 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”
25 Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God.
Mark 9:23, 24 NIV
23 “Everything is possible for one who believes.”
24 Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
Jeremiah 23:24 NIV
24 “Do not I fill heaven and earth?” declares the LORD.
