When life gets tough, what spills from your cup

​A friend shared this analogy with me yesterday. I spent some time thinking about it while I was out on the trails yesterday. It goes like this:

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You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.

Why did you spill the coffee?

"Because someone bumped into me!!!"

Wrong answer.

You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup.

Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out.

Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It's easy to fake it, until you get rattled.

**
Out on the trails yesterday, I first thought of this analogy in terms of running. I thought about how when it comes to race day, what comes out of you on the trail or on the road is what you've been pouring into you over the months leading up to that race.

If you've poured strength into you - you've put in those training miles, you've eaten well, you've gotten plenty of rest - then strength will come out of you when you are put to the test. If you haven't, well you can't pour something out of a cup that hasn't been poured into it first.

Running isn't the only test in life; it SURE isn't the only test in MY life. Our worlds get rocked with all sorts of tests. Relationship tests. Health tests. Job related tests. Someone cuts me off on the highway tests.

And the same holds true for those tests that holds true for that running test. What's been poured into us will pour out of us in those moments.

If in the months and years leading up to those moment I've practiced exploding with anger, anger will pour out. If I've practiced forgiveness, forgiveness will pour out. If I've practiced letting my middle finger fly, that ugly finger WILL fly.

In so many test moments, it's our natural instincts that take over, not who or what we think we are - or even who we wish we could be in that moment. What we've poured into our cups, that WILL pour out.

For me, because of my faith, I strive to always pour out Jesus. My faith is all about working to have my natural responses to life look like the responses Jesus had to life.

I am a work in progress - of that you can be sure.

But the key to that work isn't memorizing what Jesus believed, it's about practicing how Jesus responded to the people he encountered in his life. The key isn't to hanging a golden rule sign on my office wall, it's about loving the hard to love people that walk through that office door.

Memorizing what Jesus would do does nothing to shape my instincts to the tests in life. Practicing what Jesus DID - that is what fills my cup.

That is what determines whether or not Jesus spills out when my world gets rattled.

When life gets tough, what spills out of your cup?