Big, White Bowl.

Life- is a big, white porcelain bowl, I tell you, and it’s full of God in it.

I was just thinking about things the other day, about why we hunger continually. If life is a big, white porcelain bowl and full of God in it, why is it we continually feel empty inside, and continually fill our lives with things, activities and clutter?

I had just cleared out a good two-thirds of my wardrobe, feeling much lighter from the carthartic process and wondering why it is that the more we have, the more we desire, and the emptier we feel inside. But the more I gave away, the less I owned, and the more fulfilled I was.

We fill our big, white porcelain bowls, meant to be full of God, with things- work, fancy clothes, movies, nice vehicles, things to do. And the more things we put in, the less space God has. Our things take up space, we strain our eyes to see God through the clutter and mess, and we find it harder to see God for who He really could be, who He really is. Forced out of our bowls by Things, He cannot take His rightful place.

On the contrary, there are some whose bowls are full of Things, and yet full of God at the same time. How can this be? If taking things out of our bowls means giving more room for God in our lives, how can the person with fame, money and Things have more of God than he who lives an ascetic life with not a single possession in his bowl?

Why surely he can.

For God is not limited by things, only by the desires behind them.

You see, things by themselves don’t really take up space in our bowls. Things such as work, leisure and possessions by themselves don’t have the power to push God out. But the desires behind the things- greed, vanity, insecurity, lust- these take up space and eat away not God, but the space which God meant to take up. Some people have lots of Things too, but because their possessions are no longer tied to their emotional states, because their Things are connected to God instead, God is still as big as God can be in their big, white bowls.

Life is a big, white porcelain bowl. It is, I tell you, and it’s full of God in it.

And to stop starving, to start being truly fulfilled and full of God, one must make the conscious effort to remove the desires behind those things. It is not suffcient to throw Things out, for if the desires behind them stay, the emptiness in the bowl remains- in the shape of a piece of clothing, a car, a big house, a computer game. It’s easy to clear Things out, throw, remove and make space. But if we do not allow God to remove the desirous intents behind them, we only make a vacuum which has even more sinister power to suck more Things in to fill our empty bowls.

God can truly be God only when we make room for Him by asking him to fill the empty spaces in our big, white porcelain bowls. God can fill our bowls in the same way, with or without things, as long as our things are rooted in God and not in our own insecurities- though very often, God can be Big and fill our bowls more easily when we ask Him to remove the distracting intents behind the Things from our bowls and very often, this means us taking the first step to removing trash out of our bowls.

We’re so obsessed with filling our bowls, not knowing that it’s filled with God already. And the more we try to fill it, the less of God we end up with.

But how can God be contained… in a bowl?

And here comes the mindblowing bit- He can’t. Our bowls are gifts from Him. All they hold is just a little glimpse into the infinite measure of God. The day our bowls get smashed and we return to heaven, we shall see God exploding from our bowls to fill the entire universe with all His fullness, bigness and glory.

Our lives are big, white porcelain bowls, given to us for a little while, housing a little bit of our very Big God, holding just a foretaste of heaven.

Big bowls.