Broken Pot Wealth

There is this little story about a broken pot that as the person uses it to carry water every day it leaves droplets of water along her path. One day she realizes where those droplets have fallen over time has repeated a beautiful flower pathway for her to enjoy as she carries water. If it were not for the broken pot then the flowers may not have ever appeared. To me, this is a story about wealth. When it seems like we are just carrying water from a leaking pot we are actually growing something great at the same time. What a hopeful and encouraging story right?

We lose sight of the meaning of this story all the time. The stress of living makes it seem like it would be rather frustrating to carry a leaking pot every day. I’m sure that was a mom who was like , “Oh great, now I won’t have enough water to do the laundry and will need to make another trip!” We can get so wrapped in the stress of the cracks of our life that we forget the bigger picture of nature all around us creating something wonderful. Paying attention to the details is important but not losing sight of our bigger picture and where it is taking us is where we see the wealth in our day even through our labors of managing a broken pot.

When I think of what it means to build wealth in my life I too often get very wrapped up in the monetary side of it all. I am concerned how I will pay bills if I lose my job for instance and how long our savings would last. That is a constant stress for many of us and a serious one. As a result most of us are carrying about these cracked pots with job labeled on them trying to keep it going until we get to the next payday and maybe one day can buy our freedom through retirement. Those pots are big, heavy and cracked through endless storms that hit against them as we carry them along our path. It is not much fun carrying those pots and at times I have really struggled seeing flowers growing along the way from it.

Building wealth from a job is one of the toughest loads I have ever carried. It takes a long time for one and secondly these days there is absolutely no guarantee someone won’t knock that pot in the ground busting it all together. That has certainly happened to me a few times with layoffs, angry bosses who hang you out to dry and a few other work bully incidents. There I am carrying my leaking job pot and someone just comes up and breaks it into pieces. Now I have to enough of it back together to hold water (i.e., pay bills) and have something to carry my family and I from. It was one of those broken pot situations that I finally looked up.

After I got done crying about the broken pot laying all around me, I got mad. I said enough of this and there had to be a better way. Granted I did end up needing to find another job and another job and another after those but it instilled in me the necessity to consider other types of water containers. It also gave me the perspective that if I had to work I deserved to have it be for something that served me more than just monetarily. This was the start of realizing how much of my own wealth I could create with my own hands.

It isn’t that any of us are incapable of making our own wealth but rather we have been told this lie that it is too hard for so long that we start to believe it. We think we don’t have the time, energy, our kids are too little or something else that is in our way of building wealth in any other way than a job. I won’t add to the lie and say it is easy but it is definitely well worth it. The wealth gained by doing something with your own hands that is one hundred percent your own is some of the richest work I have ever done in my life. It has changed the entire way I even see wealth in my life.

So while I’m still carrying a large cracked pot lab