God Is Looking for Conduits, Not Barrels

There are a zillion things I still want in life. Okay, maybe just a few thousand.

But my life has been filled with an absurd amount of blessing, and I don’t always slow down enough to notice it.

Tina and I were driving the other night and got to talking about what we’re actually thankful for. Our relationship with God. How close we are with our grown kids and how much fun we’re having with all of them these days. Our home. Our community.

If I went for the long list it would run pages. Health. Friendships. My iPad. My guitars.

That was a nice conversation in a car. Some friends of ours took the same idea considerably further.

The night they wrote it all down

Some close friends here in Tacoma, part of a missional community, finished a meal together one evening and decided to try something.

They were going to list everything they had collectively been blessed with. Not the highlights. Everything.

They got out those big 3M sticky pages, the ones about two feet by three, and ten or twelve of them started writing.

It took over an hour.

When they finally ran out, there were huge white pages stuck to the walls all around the living room, and the dining room, and down the hallway, and partway up the stairs.

The lists were not what you’d expect. Skills and talents, sure. But also dishes and bedding. Lawnmowers and tools. Education and experiences. On and on and on.

They were genuinely amazed at what they were looking at.

And then they were stuck with it. Because once you can see all of it on the wall, you can’t really go back to thinking you don’t have much.

Why it can be hard to feel blessed

I want to be careful here, because sometimes it is genuinely hard to feel like your life is full of blessing.

Hardship robs that sense. So do disappointments, and grief, and long seasons where you’re just trying to get through the week.

And even when we can see the blessing, most of us aren’t sure what to do with it. Knowing how to live as a blessing to somebody else is its own separate problem.

So let me give you the picture that sorted this out for me.

A conduit or a barrel

God is looking for conduits of his generosity. He is not looking for barrels to store these things in.

A conduit is a pipe. It’s the thing water or electricity or any other supply gets routed through on its way somewhere else. Nothing stays in a conduit. That isn’t a design flaw, it’s the entire job.

A barrel is for storing. It holds what you put in it, and it holds it for later.

Both are useful objects. Only one of them is what God is after.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. When we covet our stuff, when we act like we’re the source of our own income and supply and time, we’re showing that our hearts aren’t actually at rest.

We hang on because underneath it we believe the supply is short.

That’s not a generosity problem. It’s a belief problem. And it usually means we’ve quietly stopped trusting that God is good and that he’s got us.

Prefer a quick video on this? I recorded a short one you can pass along to your team or friends: Why You’re Blessed to Be a Blessing

So which one are you, most of the time?

Not in theory. In practice, over the last month.

Everything you have has been given to you for two reasons. To enjoy, genuinely and without guilt. And to be a blessing to somebody else.

Both. Not one or the other.

Our neighbors and coworkers are paying closer attention than we think. Not to our opinions. To whether we hold on.

So go ahead and tip over the barrel and find out what happens. My experience is that God tends to turn the faucet up, though that has never once been the reason worth doing it.

If your family wants to live this way together on purpose, that’s the whole idea behind Blessed to Be a Blessing: Your Family on Mission.

And if the belief underneath it feels thin, Bigger Gospel is a short free read on why a small gospel can’t hold up a generous life.

FAQ

Q1: Where do I even start if I’ve never thought of myself as having much?
Do what our friends did. Write it all down, including the lawnmower. Most of us underestimate by an enormous margin, and you can’t give away what you haven’t noticed you have.

Q2: Is it wrong to save money or own nice things?
No. A conduit still has walls. The question isn’t whether anything is ever in your hands, it’s whether anything ever moves through them. Saving with an open hand looks different than hoarding with a nervous one, and you usually know which one you’re doing.

Q3: What if I give and it gets taken advantage of?
It will happen sometimes. That’s part of the deal and it was part of the deal for God too. Grace that can only go to people who use it correctly isn’t grace, it’s payment.