Are you filling buckets?

I once told a homeless man, a total stranger, that I loved him.  Sounds totally weird but it just came out.  I guess I could say it was an overflow of the love God has shown me...and it just spilled over.  But he was touched, and smiled, and said, "God bless you."  And I am pretty darn sure God knew he needed to hear it, and let me be the messenger.  I am also pretty sure that in that moment, God put his heart for that man into my heart, because I genuinely felt like I meant what I said. 

I am grateful that someone once said to me, "When you wake up, you should pray that you will have the eyes to see who God needs you to bless today."  Because there is someone, every day, for you to minister to, if you only have your eyes open to see.  It may be someone in your close circle, it may be a stranger at the grocery store, and it may be someone who is downright unloveable.  Ever since I started to pray that way, God has opened my eyes.

When Selah was in preschool she participated in an activity called the "joy-giver."  Each student is to go around and say something kind to someone else, and then they respond with, "thank you, joy giver!" 

Aww, sweet isn't it?  But also very practical.  And the concept is highly minimized in this self-serving world we live in. 

Micah came home from kindergarten and told me the "bucket story."  He explained that everyone has a bucket, and everyone deserves a full bucket.  When we love other people, or are kind to them, our buckets get filled, and so do theirs.  But when we are hurtful or unkind to others, we empty their buckets, AND our own.

If we were willing for God to use us this way, to see each person as having a bucket that you yourself are capable of filling, how blessed would we all be? 

Jennifer Kennedy Dean wrote, "We are the dispensers of His life.  What He wants to do in your world, He will do through you.  The Father will put you where He wants you.  He will bring into your life or to your attention everyone He wants to love through you.  You've already been assigned.  You will not have to find God's will; God's will finds you.  When His life flows through you to others, you will have the privelage of seeing the power of God at work.  It will produce in you exuberant joy. "

"For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works,  which God prepared in advance for us to do."  -2 Tim. 3:5

So I challenge you to see each day, each interraction, as having the potential to be a God-ordained moment.  It may not mean telling total strangers you love them.  Just slow down long enough to make eye contact and give a warm smile to someone who may be hurting and losing hope in humanity.  Stop and ask how their day is going.  Buy a stranger a coffee.  It's really really simple to make a deep impact.  How did we ever get moving so fast that we forgot that the girl who checked us out at the grocery store is human?  Might sound silly, but since I've been thinking this way, God has allowed me to witness some amazing moments, just by showing His love to total strangers.  If christians aren't "being" Jesus to the hurting and lost world, who will be?