What happens with emptiness?
After two instances took place, I am pondering what happens when something is empty. First, the rush of the month of May settled into the summerish rhythms of June. Spring soccer finished. Our home school group activities have slowed for summer. The swift month of May was a time of graduations, volunteering, birthdays, Mother’s Day, and very full weekend calendars. The busy hum of our schedule looks different, and I wonder about the days with an empty space on my planner.
The second thing: a shared e-mail* from my husband, keeps popping into my thoughts. It was an e-mail on how to deal with technology addictions with children. It gave the illustration on why removing the thing (in this case technology) the person is addicted to doesn’t solve the addiction problem. They had you picture an empty bottle to represent a void in a person’s life. The writer clarified: “This doesn’t mean that the person is hopeless. It means that they need someone to help them fill these voids with healthy habits, skills, and relationships.”
If you picture the bottle being dunked in a sink of dirty dishwater, you will see it will fill up with the filth of water. This symbolizes a person filling the void with an addiction.
I did a quick on-line search and Aristotle coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum.” Science may have a few exceptions, but it is mostly a rule that what is empty needs to be filled.
Thinking about open days on a calendar and empty bottles representing room for addictions makes me think of the word: “intentional.” I think of purposefulness. If empty will be filled, I may choose how it is filled. In the area of my scheduling, this appears as selecting writing evenings and practicing treating that time as an appointment with a friend (only missed for extreme emergencies). It looks like making time to write cards and e-mails to my dear ones; selecting what morning I will go for a solo run; and scheduling playdates and park days. I decided that once the house is quiet and all the other precious humans are asleep, I am going to tap into my owl-like abilities and stay up a bit longer to study scripture (I’ve finally decided that I can forgo the early morning quiet times that sound so lovely, but don’t get me out of bed).
This goes further than my calendar and schedule.
How do I fill my empty stomach?
How do I fill my empty spaces of quiet as I fall asleep or wake?
How do I fill an empty suitcase, shopping cart, or wallet?
How do I fill my empty (lonely) heart?
If you read the Old Testament scriptures, you will see God commanding His people not to come to him empty-handed. They were to bring an offering. As you continue reading the books of the Old Testament, you see the people couldn’t bring to God what was needed for a relationship with Him. The command of the old way was to usher in a big arrow pointing to the need for Christ. Now, we know: we can only come empty-handed. We are promised to be filled. The big void inside doesn’t fill when we fill our calendar, stomach, quiet, cart, or wallet.
If we notice empty, let’s think “intentional filling.” For me this first looks like a friendship with Jesus. Then, the filling overflows to helpful habits, moments of prayer, asking questions, answering honestly, and do-overs.
How do you fill emptiness?
*The email was called “Helping Kids Resist Technology Addiction” by Dr. Charles Fay.
