Can You Drink This Cup?

Picture this life of ours as a cup.

Poured into this cup is a complex mixture of joy and sorrow, security and doubt, love and pain, success and defeat. We do not choose the proportions and no one else has the same mixture that we do. On some days that mix feels weighted in favor of joy and we are glad to drink from our cup. It’s a celebration. Other times, it becomes bitter with agony and we want to cry out, “I don’t want this cup! I didn’t ask for this!”

In the garden, Jesus himself prayed, "Father, remove this cup from me. But please, not what I want. What do you want?" (Luke 22:42)

Jesus was, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3) He knew these sorrows of ours intimately and took them upon himself so that the sorrows of our life would not embitter and overshadow the great love that our Father has for each and every one of his children.

In his book “Can You Drink the Cup?” Henri Nouwen writes:

“Drinking the cup of life makes our own everything we are living. It is saying, ‘This is my life,’ but also ‘I want this to be my life.’”

“Often when we wish to comfort people, we say: ‘Well, it is sad this has happened to you, but try to make the best of it.’ But ‘making the best of it’ is not what drinking the cup is about. Drinking our cup is not simply adapting ourselves to a bad situation and trying to use it as well as we can. Drinking our cup is a hopeful, courageous, and self-confident way of living. It is standing in the world with head erect, solidly rooted in the knowledge of who we are [God’s beloved child!], facing the reality that surrounds us, and responding to it from our hearts.”

We are touched by people who have responded to their cup, full of challenges and heartache, who have chosen instead to focus their trust in the love that the Father has for them and in turn they echo the words of Jesus, “Father, remove this cup from me. But please, not what I want. What do you want?"

It is this example of Christ himself who stands by and gives us the courage and faith we need to drink the cup “that makes our own everything we are living.”

(Note: I found Nouwen's words in a book which I just completed last month entitled "The Essential Henri Nouwen." I found it to be a very compassionate and uplifting book and highly recommend it to anyone who would like to add it to their own inspirational readings).