Nothing is more than everything.
I had an emptiness inside. I heard it called a "God-shaped hole". It needed to be filled with God because nothing was greater than God.
But that would require I relinquish my position as the center of my universe.
Unacceptable.
So I went searching for nothing. After all, if nothing is greater than God, then it must be something worth finding.
So I pursued nothing.
I searched for nothing in my school. There were some weighty textbooks that dealt with nothing. They spoke of abstract thoughts, palliative belief systems and infinite time plus chance.
Nothing resonated strongly from all of them, but refused to be defined in such a way that I could do something meaningful with it.
Don't get me wrong. These subjects offered plenty of things to do, but I found it was a lot of motion with very little meaning.
One book told me to look long and hard within myself in order to find whatever it was I sought.
I did that.
The only thing I found was the existential crisis that started me on this journey.
It forced me to examine the emptiness inside me. It was cold and detached and terrifying. It demanded to be filled.
Everything I'd learned so far seemed inadequate to fill that emptiness. I was certain that nothing could fill it. So I continued my search.
I spoke with other people who seemed to have found nothing themselves. They offered excellent guidance in finding a host of Somethings. Somethings that included everything from deep breathing to primal screaming to accumulating wealth to reviling materialism with all manner of odd beasts in between.
All of this did seem to point to nothing, but every time I thought I had it nailed down I discovered it was something. And if nothing was the only thing greater than God, then any something, no matter how grand, must be less than God. Only nothing offered something more than God could provide.
Then it was clear.
That sounds very transitional, but the truth is it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that nothing was truly greater than God.
Everything I learned, everything I read, everything I tried; all of it was insufficient by itself because all of it was incomplete. The arrogance of atheistic human intellect was destined to leave me cold and empty and yearning to be filled. All the distractions of a hedonistic culture could be thrown into that void and it would forever be unsatisfied.
That emptiness required everything.
Up to now I thought I was everything. The world entered my mind through my ears, my eyes, my nose, tongue, and skin. It was all filtered through my narcissistic need to make sense of it according to my own notions, my own desires.
I discovered that I was simply not enough to fill that emptiness within.
I knew that I would eventually reach the end of my life. In that day I would be no closer to satisfying that yawning chasm.
But God was.
My questions regarding how to be more than I was are all answered in knowing God. My need to find someone greater than myself to learn from, to be inspired by, is satisfied in knowing God. My desire for mystery and unknown wonders to explore delights in wrestling with an infinite God.
When my perspective changed to allow me to see God as the first, biggest, and most important part of everything, then I was able to see how nothing was not worth searching for. Nothing is easy to find. It's all that would be left if God was not God.
God could fill that emptiness inside because God is everything.
And everything is so much more than nothing.
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