Broken Cups

You can reach a certain level of tiredness where memories and plans collide. Where thoughts and dreams slam into each other ungracefully.

I had a dream last night. I think we started out in China, phased into Northern France and then crash-landed into some geographically undetermined mountain range. The Beijing air is thick, and the sun is slanting down on us, heavily. I am overseeing the camp’s ‘afternoon activities’, a task that should be fun but today it’s full of stress-filled question marks. I haven’t had chance to work out what precise ‘activities’ we are going to spring upon the children, let alone source the necessary equipment.

But inspiration seeps through recently lived experience. I come up with two games, both of which are founded on the same principle and aim: fill two hours with  getting the children to comply with “Operation Total Exhaustion”. China has schooled her children well; they are (mostly) already assembled in neat, trim lines. I start explaining what the rules of the game are, adjusting the parameters of what exactly they are going to do as I go along.

Both games have a simple object: “You must soak the head of your foreign teacher!”  And both games hinge on the same challenge: “Can you transport some water from A to B using a totally inadequate vessel? Ooooooh, and of course, it is a race!”

I did consider asking them to transport the water using their hair, but that idea didn’t make the cut. Instead they all get one plastic cup with a pen nib size hole in it and a bucket of water, and they set out on the longest relay race we can mark out with the available space. My teammates very nobly submit to shoving their head in a bucket - a position which should enable them to monitor how much water their team has collected and get soaked at the same time.

The kids are so sweet. At first, they beam with pride over the minuscule amount of moisture that ends up on the top of foreign teacher’s head. But the game is clearly flawed, and it isn’t long before the kids realise that they have essentially been set up to fail. 

In the haze, I wake up. In the middle of the heat and the hubbub and the motion of the afternoon, I recede for a moment, still holding onto my exemplar punctured plastic cup. My arm has dropped to my side. My fingers toy with the cup, measuring its fragility. For a moment, I wonder why I’m holding on to it - it’s completely worthless (apart from the game). But the clamour of the kids brings me back.  

We are barely ten minutes into the game and they are all indignant: 

“Why do you give us broken cups?” 

I smile one of those knowing, merciless, exasperating teacher-smiles.

“Ahhh.... Everyone’s cup is broken. Everyone is the same.”

The question reverberates in my head as I stand there, my fingers poised to crush my cup. “Why broken? Why do you give us broken cups?”  I feel that the kids’ frustration should be comical, but there is real sadness born of real failure in their eyes. They want much more water than their slashed plastic cups allow them to carry. They want to carry the water successfully, efficiently. They’re embarrassed, and I am frozen for a moment as I realise how like the children I am. 

Faced with an infinitely abundant fountain, I don’t want to admit my recurrent need, my searing thirst. I guess it’s the scale my heart balks at. I’m uncomfortable that the fountain is so extravagant and that I am so thirsty. It’s just too much. I don’t want to be seen to be this desperate for the water, I want to look cool, composed, competent... I would like to help myself to the water without losing face - I don’t want you to know how parched my heart is, and I definitely would prefer God not to see...

So the solution? Some amateur attempts at distraction: 

“God, please come and take a look at how skilled I am now at carrying the water. Quick, let’s divert some attention away from my neediness and on to the things I can do.”

All I have is a plastic cup that has gaping holes in it. I thrust it into the fountain and bolt; the jolting motion and the holes mean that almost all the water is gone immediately. So I cheat. I try and seal the cup up with my other hand; the water trickles through my fingers.

You can tell that the cup had some water in it once. But that’s it. That’s really it. That’s all. The children are still profoundly dissatisfied with these weird English games. The object of the game (water transportation) has not been met. But they already know how to justify this to themselves and anyone else who is willing to listen. “The equipment you gave us was inadequate to task.”

“I tried very hard to carry my water well, but all I had was a broken cistern, God - a broken cistern....

Why do YOU give us BROKEN cups?”

I realise that I have effectively been coming to Jesus with a  little, punctured plastic cup and saying ‘Look Jesus, I have some water here! Are you impressed?’

That is all that taking refuge in what I can do for God ever amounts to. God has no interest in broken, leaky cups - or my against-the-odds success at water transportation in these adverse circumstances. God is still offering me a fountain that I could never afford, but that he has on tap for me. For free. 

We so easily mistake what God would have us do. The task we’ve been given is not carrying the water - it’s drinking the water. You’re not supposed to be neatly bottling this water up and dispatching it to people; you’re to drag them to the fountain of life. You’re not supposed to be topping up your water bottle from this fountain, storing it up for the day when you might be thirsty.

You're to stick your whole head in it and lap it up. That is what honours the fountain. 

And the people you’re afraid of being so needy in front of?
They will be freed by your example.

"Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the LORD. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. Jeremiah 2:13 

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! 
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” Isaiah 55:1