Full Bowl

I received a beautiful, handmade gift from my daughter for Mother’s Day this year. She said this ceramic piece was one of her proudest creations yet. It is a bowl with a formed space in the center that’s in the shape of a heart. Because my daughter knows me well, she completed the gift with a bag of Hershey Kisses. Voila! This is what resulted:

As this week passed on, I made sure I properly used the beautiful gift from my daughter - haha. However, I also began to look at the bowl in a new light. 

The month of May…it’s a month where many of us can definitively say that our plates are full. The end of the school year, the beginning of yard work season, the longer days calling out to us to get more done in the extra hours of daylight…and we often do. I started looking at this full bowl before me. As I walked by it in the kitchen, I began to see an analogy I needed to live by this month.

My personal bowl was full. It has been full of….emotions, endings, beginnings, planning, and a growing list of tasks. I’m sure many of you can relate for a variety of reasons. 

Our bowls are teeming with every possible “delicacy” or “roughage” we could ingest. How is your bowl looking? Have you been able to intake and digest many of the things in your full bowl? Have things fallen out? Maybe it feels like there’s an imaginary spoon continually scooping more and more servings into your bowl. We likely would rather keep certain things in our bowl and get rid of others.

Before I was allowed to dwell too much on all the things in my bowl, my attention was brought back to the center: a large heart. 

Jesus tells His disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me.” (John 14:1) Jesus is our way to the Father. We are all journeying to the Father. Our goal is to grow ever closer to the heart of the Father.

At the center of Aubrey’s bowl for me is a heart. While her initial design plan was to hold Hershey Kisses with the heart being a repository for the foil wrappings (she KNOWS me), I saw the bowl in a new light this week. I needed to see, and find gratitude, that despite all the things in my bowl - the emotions, the tasks, the endings, and beginnings - at the center of my life is God’s heart. Love itself. 

My prayer for you (and me) is that while your bowl is full, may you continue to see the heart in the center. The heart of God that overarches and transcends all things. May it bring you peace. And if your bowl isn’t too full right now, then I encourage you to be the peace for someone else whose bowl is full. “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”