Filling Our Bowls

On most of the surfaces in the room where I write these blog posts, I have china dishes of all shapes and sizes, many inherited from my mother. Two of these in particular always catch my eye.

The first is this small round dish with a picture of roses painted inside. I’ve had this dish since I was about six or seven years old. I won it at a fairground.

Each year a visiting fair came to my hometown over a bank holiday weekend and my parents always took my brother and me to visit it. Nowadays, travelling fairs are few and far between and those which do visit where I live now are mostly for children below the age of ten, the tiny roundabouts too big for anyone older.

The prizes for success at one of the many stalls at the fairground were always interesting and, as you can see, of reasonable quality and worth keeping. This dish is now in its sixth decade.

The second favourite among my collection of dishes is actually a sugar bowl. It forms part of a beautiful Shelley fine bone china coffee set decorated with a Blue Iris pattern. This is one I’ve inherited from my mother.

During her early teenage years, she attended a boarding school in rural Hampshire to escape the bombing in her home city of Portsmouth during the second World War. In 1985, She arranged a reunion of former pupils and staff to mark the 40^th anniversary of VE Day and then kept in touch with her former headmaster for the rest of his life. The coffee set was a wedding present to him and his wife in 1928 and he left it to my mother when he died. The whole set is quite beautiful and gives me immense pleasure every time I look at it.

The Shelley bowl has a far greater value financially than the fairground bowl, while the fairground one has a direct connection to a childhood memory. Therefore both are equally attractive and precious to me and I’d be very upset if either got damaged.

This got me thinking about the objects (rather than, in this instance, the people) we humans value and how we assess their value. What are the most important things we keep around us? What would we try to save in the event of a fire once our family were safe? Would it be those things which would make it easier to sort out the mess practically and financially as quickly as possible i.e. our insurance policies, identification documents and, of course, the electronic devices without which nowadays we’d struggle to even start the simplest of the processes needed?

Maybe it would be those precious photos of our families, perhaps covering many generations? Wedding photos? Babies’ first shoes or teddy bears? Perhaps, if it were possible, we’d try to save some precious bone china bowls, or simply that misshapen, thumb dented bowl made by a child in their first year at school which has no monetary value but is priceless, nevertheless?

Bowls are such useful things: they can hold all kinds of things, ranging from the sweet like sugar, to the warming like soup. They are always open to receive whatever we need to put inside them.  Perhaps we can think of ourselves as bowls too. Always open to receive what God wants to place inside us.

It doesn’t matter whether we see (or would like to see) ourselves as a piece of delicate bone china or a misshapen and cracked bowl, we are equally priceless to God, who has an interest in us which is lifelong and eternal. It doesn’t matter what size we are; God will continue to make us grow and grow, our lives expanding to take in all he has to offer and all that he’ll pour into us throughout our lives. He’ll repair any cracks or breaks we pick up along the way too if we let him.

Whatever bowls you have in your home and whether they are valuable financially, or sentimentally, your use of them is unique to you, just as you are a unique bowl just waiting for God to fill, in the unique way he chooses to. Perhaps you could let any special bowls you have, be a daily reminder of this ….  but don’t forget to dust them regularly! Or, why not simply make a bowl with your hands each time you pray?