Empty Spaces

How many times have we walked in our homes, noticed an empty space and think of something that would be just the right object to give the room a different look. The opposite is true when we’re doing some shopping and out of nowhere we spot an item that would fill an empty space in our home and we buy it or put it on our gift list for someone else to treat us with just the perfect gift.

The summer has been very hot and very dry. My flower beds, like many of yours are probably finishing up and we’ve begun some late summer, fall clean-up a little earlier this year. In the midst of the clean-up, I find myself looking at the empty spaces in the garden and planning for next spring and what I might do differently as late winter breaks forth spring’s potential. The empty spaces ignite my imagination and I see something different.

As I think about that perfect item that will set off a room in our home or the right kind of plant, shrub, or flower that will fill in that empty space next spring, I can see how empty spaces allow for new things to happen in our lives. In spiritual disciplines throughout the centuries, we know that there are mystics and monastics that live their lives, engaging in a spiritual discipline of emptying themselves so that they might be more receptive to the new ways in which God’s Spirit fills their souls and gives them new life.

It is easy to look at empty spaces and feel sadness and grief, but the empty places that we feel may be a way in which God is about to show us something new. New things can happen only when there is space for the new things to bubble up and grow. When we crowd our lives with the familiar, we lose the power to see the newness that can be. When we lose a spouse or a loved one or even a job or something else that is significant for us, we feel emptiness. Sometimes we call this emptiness, grief. Each one of us grieves our losses differently. There can be unhealthy grief that leads most often to depression, but also self-pity, or a growing sense of isolation, and perhaps even lead to death. This is unhealthy grieving. When we can grieve in healthy ways, we can celebrate our memories, but still allow the Holy Spirit to bring us new things, filling our empty space and enabling us to embrace the new life that God is giving us today. The empty tomb, like empty spaces, is not a place of death; it is the place where new life can break forth and show us a different reality that reminds us of God's ongoing and  abundant blessings.

Prayer  

           God of empty spaces, fill our darkness with the joy of the resurrection. Just as the seed is planted in the dark shadows of the earth, a seedling breaks through the earth filled with potential and possibility. Help me to be the seed that finds life in the darkness. Amen.