Crackpot
Read the story first: Crackpot.
Standard Operating Procedure
Before beginning, come together as a group to briefly discuss prayer needs and pray for God’s guidance, wisdom, and protection over this time. Then sit face to face with no distractions, hold hands, and maintain eye contact. Do not rush.
Partner Exercise
You have read the story about the cracked pot. A rusted-out drum in a pasture, and the grass grows greener around it. A clay pot on the path with a crack down the side, and the flowers along that path are the ones people stop for. Neither one was built for that. Both of them did it anyway.
Think back to a time in your childhood, typically between the ages of 5 and 10, when somebody watered you. Not a lesson somebody taught on purpose. Somebody who leaked a little of what they had in your direction, the way Aunt Gladys did with me. A grandmother. A neighbor. A teacher who kept you after class. A man at church who learned your name. It could be small. It is usually small. Tell your partner who it was, what they gave you, and what you did with it. Then trade places.
I don’t want you to match my story. I want you to think of your own. Listen without interrupting, without trying to fix it, and without analyzing it. Simply listen and absorb what the other person felt.
Questions
- Who was the cracked pot on your path, and did they ever know what they gave you?
- What kind of pot were you made to be? The one the king drinks from, the one that goes down the well, or the one that sits by the path and leaks? Be honest.
- Where in your life are you still wrestling with what you are instead of embracing it?
- What do you see in your partner that they have never accepted about themselves, and what does it water in you?
- What is one thing your partner said tonight that you had never heard before?
Mission
This week, go together and buy a clay pot. A cheap one from the hardware store, five or six dollars. Before you plant anything in it, crack it. Take a hammer and put one crack down the side. Then fill it with dirt, put something in it that will grow, and set it where the two of you walk past it every day. Water it, and watch where the water goes.
The pot is not the point. The point is the two of you deciding together where you leak. Every one of us waters something. Some of us water a grudge. Some of us water a garden. Before the week is out, sit down with each other and answer one question: what is the water in me going to, and is that where I want it to go?
Enjoy this one. Buy the pot, get your hands dirty, laugh about the hammer. Keep it lighthearted. There is no right or wrong answer here, only an honest one.
Drafted for review — not yet approved by Ron.