The Bucket List That Never Filled

In 2014, Marcus Elliot retired from thirty-one years at a packaging plant in Toledo, Ohio. He had saved carefully. He had plans. A screened-in porch. Season tickets to the Mud Hens. A bass boat he had been eyeing at Cabela's for three years. One by one, he checked every item off. By the following spring, he had the porch, the tickets, and the boat sitting in his driveway on a trailer with custom rims.

And he was miserable.

His wife, Denise, found him one evening sitting on that brand-new porch, staring at nothing. "I thought this was supposed to feel different," he told her. He described it like pouring water into a colander — everything he reached for slipped straight through.

It was Denise who finally said the thing he needed to hear: "Marcus, you spent thirty years dreaming about what you would do for yourself. Did you ever once ask God what He was dreaming about for you?"

That summer, Marcus started mentoring young men at his church. Within a year, he said the porch finally felt like home — not because anything on it had changed, but because he had stopped living for it.

The prophet Haggai watched an entire nation do what Marcus did. They paneled their own houses while the Lord's house sat in rubble. They earned wages and dropped them into a purse full of holes. The Almighty was not withholding blessing out of spite. He was waiting for His people to remember that no amount of personal comfort can fill a space only His purposes were designed to occupy.