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| A fellow counselor serving trip food |
"If you kill it you __________"
"FILL IT!"
I heard this refrain every day all summer long as a camp counselor at HoneyRock. We taught our kids that if they finished a dish during a meal, they were responsible for refilling it so others could have more. The concept was simple: be aware of the needs of others and take responsibility for what you've done. Our campers would dutifully and rapidly refill every dish they had finished. The only trouble occasionally being that the other campers either wouldn't want more or they would only want one serving. So my co-counselor and I told our campers to ask everybody else if they wanted more before they went to get more helpings so we weren't wasting food. They wanted to make sure everything was full and while I appreciated their helping hands, I had to tell them it was okay if something remained empty. Or is it?
How often are we the same way about far bigger things than another dish of pasta or half a dozen chicken fingers? We can't stand to see something empty, whether it's a candy dish or a place at the dinner table. A bare spot on a bookshelf means the knickknacks must be rearranged to hide it. A vacant lot is quickly built upon to create a house or building. An absent person is masked by extra chatter and smiles. We either try to fill it or to brush past it like it's not there. What about emptiness makes us uncomfortable? Perhaps because it is symbolic of the void that exists when we are not in relationship with God. Without Him, there is nothing and that is rightly terrifying. Perhaps it makes us think we don't have enough or realize we are not enough, and so for us to be "enough", everything must be full to overflowing. Perhaps because we keep trying to fill the void with all sorts of things and we can't do it, nothing works. I'm not an interior decorator (just look at my room) but from all of the Netflix reality competition shows I've watched, the empty spaces matter just as much as the filled ones. The blanks show something different than those that are occupied. Is that true beyond vacant shelves and bare areas? What do the empty places in our lives mean?
I have been reminded of this cycle of abstaining and refilling as I've been practicing Lent. I find myself looking for ways to fill the absences of the things I have given up. I want to supply them with something else that might be more or less healthy than what I gave up in the first place. I hunger for instant gratification and entertainment instead of allowing my thoughts to wander or being okay with being bored and sitting still. I wish I hadn't been conditioned this way. What I can do is fight against it and be okay with the silence and the emptiness. It's something we have all been working on in this past year. A year of much vacancy and keenness of absence felt on multiple levels by the entire world simultaneously, that has been no small thing. Lent emphasizes the void(s) and our mortality over again in ways that are challengingly poignant whether it's been the coronavirus-related racism, people unable to be together for Easter, or the mental health issues that are rising at alarming rates.
When I'm tempted to despair and give up, I have been trying to seek for rest and hope. Honestly, I feel quite empty as I write this. Depleted of my emotional, mental, and physical reserves to the point where I'm struggling to renew them for longer than a fleeting space. I am incredibly aware of my limitations and the ways I am drained and so I seek to replenish and recharge. Yet as soon as it comes in, it seems to slip away. It's temporary. not permanent. I must keep going back to the well to draw more water. So to where do I turn in this emptiness? To whom do I look? It's tempting to want to escape or push it away rather than face it and seek the true rest and renewal that only comes from the Lord. It's there if I am willing to come, to go, to surrender, to ask.
I need to allow my hunger, my boredom, my acute awareness of not being enough, to draw me closer to the Lord. I don't have these other distractions or things in my life. Lent has created these absences. Will I allow the Lord to fill them or will I do so myself? It's the emptiness that brings me to His throne of grace and makes me depend on Him. I am trying to make needed lifestyle changes and admit I need help. The barrenness is there to remind me I can't do it on my own. I am incapable of refilling myself. That can only be done by His Spirit and He will give me what is best and what is good. His Kingdom is coming soon. As much as I am seeking the hope of Easter, I am also lamenting and crying out for mercy, praying for the Spirit's intercession on behalf of myself and this sinful world.
Kyrie eleison.
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