This Is My Jar

This morning, I was lying in bed feeling defeated. My girls have been sick with a mouth virus for what feels like forever, I haven’t been feeling well myself, and although the house is finally clean, my mind could still produce an endless list of things I could be doing. There are drawers I could organize, plans I could make, work I could get ahead on, things around the house that would make our lives easier later. Instead, I was lying in bed, scrolling and comparing myself to everyone who seemed to be doing more with their day than I was.

Eventually, I had to tell myself, Emely, stop. Stop judging your life. Stop comparing it to everyone else’s. This is your life. There will always be someone doing something I am not doing. Someone is working out today. Someone is building a business. Someone has a perfectly organized home. Someone has more energy, more discipline, more money, or simply a completely different capacity than I have in this season. None of that tells me anything about whether I am being faithful with the life God has actually given me.

That thought stayed with me as I read Mark 14 and the story of the woman who came to Jesus carrying an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume. She broke the jar and poured the perfume over Jesus, and almost immediately, the people around her began evaluating her decision. “Why this waste of perfume?” they asked. They even had a perfectly reasonable alternative for what she could have done with it. The perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor.

What struck me this morning was how familiar that sounded. We are so quick to decide what should be done with someone else’s jar. And if no one around us is doing it, we are often perfectly capable of doing it to ourselves. We look at what God has placed in our hands and begin imagining all the other ways we could be using it. Maybe I should be accomplishing more. Maybe I should have more children by now. Maybe I should be further along financially. Maybe I should be more disciplined, more organized, more productive, more successful. Comparison gives us endless suggestions for what we should have done with our perfume.

But Jesus did not join their criticism. He defended her. And then He said something I cannot stop thinking about: “She did what she could” (Mark 14:8).

She did what she could. She was not responsible for doing what someone else could have done. She was not asked to carry someone else’s capacity, calling, resources, or assignment. She took what was hers and poured it before Jesus.

This morning I felt the Lord reminding me, this is your jar. My life is my jar. My marriage, my children, my home, my work, the ministry opportunities He gives me, my gifts, my resources, my limitations, and even the amount of energy I have in a particular season are all part of what has been entrusted to me. I don’t have to spend my life wondering whether my perfume would have been more valuable if it had been poured somewhere else.

One of the verses I have carried with me this year is Psalm 16:6: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” I keep returning to the idea of boundary lines. There is a portion of life that God has entrusted specifically to me. Accepting those boundaries does not mean that I stop growing, dreaming, working, or allowing God to stretch me. It simply means that I stop measuring faithfulness by somebody else’s portion.

Maybe someone else’s perfume is being poured into a business right now. Maybe hers is being poured into six children. Maybe another woman is writing a book, building a ministry, caring for an aging parent, pursuing a degree, or working long hours to provide for her family. None of those lives diminish the value of another. The question is not, What is everybody else doing with their jar? The question is, Jesus, how do You want me to pour out mine?

And sometimes the answer will look incredibly ordinary. Today, faithfulness may look like reading my Bible, holding sick children, making sure everyone has something to eat, and allowing my tired body to rest. Tomorrow it may look like recording, teaching, exercising, organizing, serving, creating, or building something God has placed on my heart. I don’t want to call one day meaningful and another wasted simply because one produced something the world can see.

There is also something freeing about realizing that I do not need to have an opinion about everyone else’s jar. I can spend so much energy thinking about what someone else should change, how someone else should respond, or what someone else should be doing differently. But their perfume belongs to them. I have enough before the Lord in simply asking Him to continue sanctifying me and teaching me to faithfully steward what He has placed in my own hands.

Perhaps that is part of what surrender looks like: opening our hands to the life God has actually given us instead of constantly negotiating for another one. Not abandoning dreams or pretending difficult seasons are easy, but trusting that even within these boundary lines there is a beautiful inheritance.

I want to learn to look at my portion and say, Lord, this is my jar. It belongs to You. Teach me how to pour it out for You. And when comparison tries to convince me that what I have offered is too small, too ordinary, or should have been used differently, I want to remember the words Jesus spoke over that woman: “She did what she could.”

What a beautiful thing it would be to reach the end of a season, or eventually the end of a life, and know that we did not do everything, we did not become everyone, and we did not fulfill every expectation placed upon us. We simply took what God placed in our hands and faithfully poured it at the feet of Jesus.