Filling my cup by emptying it

Do you ever just feel...empty? Tired? Exhausted? Depleted? Sometimes I get that way. I know what you are thinking. I do in fact realize that I have five busy, active, demanding children that I spend all day every day taking care of. But that's really not the kind of tired I'm talking about. It's more of an emotional emptiness that I'm referring to.

When I feel like this I want something to change. I want to hold my emotional cup out to anyone who will notice it and I want them to fill it up for me. I want them to say or do something that will make me feel better. I was reading in my favorite book, "Spiritual Lightening" by M. Catherine Thomas this afternoon and she was talking about this exact thing.

"...we come to the idea of the empty cup. When we feel self-doubt, when we
fear our own incapacity or unloveableness, we are tempted to search the faces of those around us for reassurance and love, holding out an empty cup we want them to fill for us. We may have held out the cup in the past and someone, full of grace, put something in it we needed so much at the time. The problem with the empty cup is that holding it out can become a habit, a way of life--we look to others for that which they cannot provide because in looking to them continually we are violating the principle of grace for grace. The Lord has so designed it that we find the answers and the fullness we need while we are putting grace into someone else's cup" (Spiritual Lightening, 139).

When I read that I felt like I had an epiphany. It doesn't really make sense that by emptying our cup and filling someone else's ours will in turn become full. Normally I would have been a skeptic but my memory immediately was drawn to an experience I had last year. Jimmy and Roman went on a Father/Son campout and I decided to host a fun girls-only sleepover at my house. We ate pizza, we played games, we snacked and giggled and did all kinds of activities. I was running around the entire night making sure the girls were all having a good time. When it was time to go to bed I was utterly physically drained. But I felt emotionally filled. I had given everything to making sure my daughters and their friends were having fun and in the process my cup was filled in return and I went to sleep that night feeling completely joyful.

But I haven't always known or thought about this filling-the-cup theory. And sometimes it can create big problems.

"Sometimes we find ourselves holding the cup out for something other than
reassurance. We hold out the cup in expectation that those around us will put in what we want them to do or to be. We criticize our poor husbands who have a hard time measuring up to our expectations, our children, our [friends], because they do not put in the cup what we think they should. We think or say, 'Can't they see I'm right?' and we withdraw our grace from them. We feel discontented, but we think those around us are the cause of our discontent. How easily we live in pointless conflict generated by pride and by ignorance or of the wiles of the devil, rending precious relationships" (Thomas, 139).

I have recently seen this exact thing happen in my life. In one instance I was the one who did not fill another's cup with what they expected and in another I was holding out my own cup and demanding it be filled the way I thought it should be. In both cases the relationships were ruined. But life is a process and a journey of learning. I realize that experiences like this, painful though they may be, are facilitators in helping me to turn a new corner and learning things I would never understand otherwise.

Lesson Learned: If I stop thinking about my own cup and focus on filling others', mine will never be empty.