Why Do We Flee from A Sense Of Emptiness?

[To listen to a reading of this article, click here.]

Last Sunday night was a dark night. I woke in the dark, thinking dark thoughts, unable to stop my mind from wandering the shadowy paths of self-condemnation. I lay awake,

• Remembering my unfulfilled promises to my kids when they were young,
• Regretting my mistakes made as a boss to good employees,
• Wondering if my life had made any difference for good in the world.

Sunrise came. I stretched and tried to shake off the phantom spirits of despondency. I looked for something to cheer me, something to help me forget the darkness.

My wife has been reading (and rereading) Ann Voscamp’s book, One Thousand Gifts. It’s a book about gratitude. I hoped it would do the trick. The first nine words were a quote,

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace)

I read those words and stopped.  I almost felt the wind knocked out of me. I lay the book aside and prayed. I meditated the next thirty minutes on this simple statement: Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

It was just what I needed but not what I wanted. It stripped my soul and breathed in life.

That morning I woke, hoping to escape from sadness, but the sadness was really an emptiness that I feared to face. I prayed, and confronted, and heard this.

Who Needs A Life of Purpose?

[To listen to a reading of this article, click here.]

Ten years ago, I was on a plane heading for New York to give a presentation. The man next to me was a professor of public speaking at a major university.

Somewhat sheepishly, I asked for advice, “What is the key to great public speaking?”

After some preliminary comments, he said this: “At the beginning of World War II, when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England, he said, ‘I felt as though my whole life had prepared me for this moment.’”

“Sam,” he continued, “the best public speakers feel as though their entire lives have prepared them for this moment.”

His words pierced me more deeply than had any other past comment or deliberate insult.

I was devastated. I didn’t feel prepared for anything of significance.

Why?

My soul longs—and I believe every soul longs—for a purpose, for a deep meaning, to know that we matter. We long for something transcendent.

Yet I believe most of us fritter our lives away with little dreams. We eagerly await our next vacation or our next car. We squander our money—or our dreams—on the next new iPhone or matching shoes and purse.

Where Is The Battlefield in Spiritual Warfare?

I love having a new laptop but I hate getting a new laptop. It takes me a couple days to transfer my old data, reinstall the applications, and setup my preferences. It’s a hassle.

Three weeks ago I bought a new laptop. Over the next several days I transferred data, installed the apps, and set it up the way I like it. It was a pain.

Ten days ago, I began work on this Spiritual Warfare article. A day later my new laptop crashed. Argh!!!! I tried to breathe life into it and failed. So I wiped the computer clean, reinstalled the operating system, and started all over again. It was a major pain.

I shared my story with a friend. He thought that my laptop crash was probably due to spiritual warfare, and that I should pray against spirits that affect technology.

I thought I had been lazy.

I Wonder If Sunday School Is Destroying Our Kids

Several years ago I met with a woman distraught by her son’s rejection of Christianity.

She said, “I did everything I could to raise him right. I taught him to be like the ‘heroes of faith,’ with the faithfulness of Abraham, the goodness of Joseph, the pure heart of David, and the obedience of Esther.”

She wondered why he rejected Christianity.

I wondered why it took him so long.

The Wonder of the Ascension

A couple of weeks ago Christians celebrated the Ascension of Jesus. Do you ever wonder why we celebrate the Ascension? I understand celebrating the birth of Jesus, and his resurrection, and even his death on a cross (if we understand what it means). But his Ascension? Yet after his Ascension, the disciples “returned … with great joy” (Luke 24:51). They celebrated the Ascension.*

When I was about ten years old, my father taught me how to sail our small sailboat. He taught me how to capture the wind, how to steer with a tiller, and how to “right” the sailboat when it capsized.

One day after another sail together, my father looked at me and said, “Go on, take her out by yourself.” The wind was rather strong; the waves were rather large; and my mother was rather terrified. I loved it. I took the boat out alone. The wind blew splashes in my excited face. I was a ten-year-old boy alone on the sea; I was Captain Hook, Christopher Columbus, and Sir Francis Drake all rolled into one.

That was one of the most memorable days of my mere ten years of existence. I still delight in the memory.

What does the Ascension have to do my solo sail? Well, quite a bit, actually. As I’ve reflected on the Ascension, here is what God is saying to me.

To Be, or to Do, that is the question

God is speaking to me again—I resist this message—about Being before Doing. I mix them up. I bet you do too. It is so “natural” to work (do) those extra hours in order to feel (be) successful; or to “do” the dishes in order to “be” considered a good spouse.

Scripture doesn’t teach doing first; it teaches being first. We have to BE loved in order to DO love (1 John 4:19).

Despite knowing in my head that I need to “be” accepted first, I tend to believe in my heart that scripture is about my “doing” to get God to like me. It’s easy to read scripture like a Christian Aesop’s Fables, little stories that promote good behavior (doing). In other words, if I do these things I’ll be a good little boy (or girl).

This Aesop’s Fables view of scripture is so ingrained in my heart that any other interpretation of a passage feels heretical. Let’s look, for example, at the parable of the Treasure in a Field.

How Does God View Us?

There’s a story about the artist Michelangelo who passed by a block of marble somewhere. He stopped transfixed and said, “I see an angel in there. Quick, bring me my chisel.”

This story illustrates how God sees his children.

Many believers I know primarily see the unfinished parts of their lives. It doesn’t matter if we are in grade school, High School, College, or in middle age. We see the things we don’t like, and we focus on the unfulfilled desires. We see the marble not the sculpture.

It’s like we are looking at our future lives through the wrong end of a telescope, everything we want to be seems really far away.

God, on the other hand, is looking at us through the other side of the telescope. He sees our future today, everything that we most deeply want to be, everything God desires for us. He sees all that now.

Just like Michelangelo.

God sees our future today, and he’s chiseling away at all that superfluous stuff that’s not us. At times that chisel may hurt a bit, but it’s just chipping away all the flakes that hide what he’s purposed us to be.

This truth is reality. God sees us today as the person he is making us to become tomorrow.

Filling the Void[ance]

My father taught me that discovering our true selves cannot be had by merely avoiding negative behavior we see in others. But herein lays an irony: even avoiding that avoidance is still just … avoiding.

To discover who we are, we need filling not just emptying.

When my father advised me not to fill my life avoiding negatives, he also encouraged me to see the good in others, and imitate it.

Avoiding Avoidance

Deathbed advice offers impact which no other advice provides.

My father died of cancer sixteen years ago. A few weeks before his death, knowing he would die soon, my father offered me advice.

As a long term pastor, my father counseled hundreds of men and women. He said that many of them lived their lives being controlled by their parents. They spent their lives avoiding their parents’ bad behavior.

My father was not an angel; he had an anger problem. He lost his temper over little events, like when he lost his keys (which he seemed to lose all the time!). He was concerned that his kids might waste their lives trying to avoid his anger issue. He advised me instead to spend my energy imitating the good things I saw in my parents and teachers and friends.

Then he said this: “If you spend your life trying not to be somebody you will spend your life not being somebody.”

We will never become ourselves by running from; we will only become our true selves by running to. If we turn our inner life into a vacuum—always removing things—our inner life will never become a thing of substance. It will always be empty.

Pursuing an Inner Life

The two pictures below show Mt. St. Helens. One was taken on May 17, 1980, and the other was taken several days later.

Beneath the calm exterior of a majestic mountain boiled an inner life that would erupt with 20,000 times more power than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Each of us has an inner and an outer life. We sense this intuitively. We say of others, “They don’t know me, the true me.” A popular book on the Myers Briggs personality test is entitled, Please Understand Me.

While we vaguely sense an inner self, we primarily invest in our outer life. We dedicate hours in running on treadmills; we devour the latest tabloid diet; we pour out our hearts on career advancement; we spend hours in shopping for shoes or for shotguns.

These external activities are like mowing the lawn of Mt. St. Helens, on May 17, 1980.

Our truest self is our inner self. We are the same person the day before we are fired as the day after. A friend recently lost most of her right arm in a freak accident, but she lost not a single strand of hair of who she truly is.

The person we are inside is our truest person. But we’ve barely begun to know that person because we fail to know our inner life. And we certainly don’t invest in it.