8. A Drop in the Bucket

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a bucket in which you place one drop, and suddenly, it’s full. –Modern Parable

Heaven is a place we work to build here on earth. This may run contrary to your idea about what heaven is. In fact, the ideas of “work” and “Heaven” may be antithetical if you see Heaven as the afterlife, or, on earth, as grace that happens naturally.

I don’t know for sure what Heaven is, but I can hope. Rather than a place where I go when I die, maybe it is a place I help to create while I am alive, every day in the here-and-now, and something I leave behind to those I love. This idea is appealing because it invites me to think about the agency I have to improve the world right now.

If the life of each person is a drop, and each person endeavors to do good work, then the bucket will fill quickly. Keeping it filled becomes a labor of love. You and I help each other know Heaven.

Hell, by extension, is an empty bucket, vacant and hollow, rather than a dark place filled with demons, sulfur that, although it burns eternally, yields no light. If this is true, then any hell has the potential to be a Heaven through my efforts. Hell is within my control rather than thrust upon me as a definitive part of my humanity, or as an alternative I need to fear if I don’t “get into” Heaven.

In fact, if I should fear anything, it is my own lack of initiative to fill the bucket. My lack of motivation, the sort of emptiness that befalls each of us from time to time, is Hell. But it can also be the reminder of what I need to do with my life.


If the world looks wrong/And your money’s spent and gone/And your friend has turned away/You can get away to Heaven/On this aeroplane/Just bow your head and pray.
–Woody Guthrie




What heavens are you building to fill the emptiness in your life?