The Void

I remember feeling it. It was in High School at the Father & Son banquet. One of my friends dad's had invited me to go along with he and his son. That was a blessing, but my father was absent, he and my mom had divorced when I was 6 months old, and I felt a void as a young man for the first time.

Then my first girlfriend's mom broke us up because she said I wasn't good enough for her, and I felt it again. When I came back from Viet Nam they spit on us at the LA airport calling us killers, not heroes, then I felt it again.  A stinging void that something was missing. Then I found an answer, alcohol and drugs and man that filled my void for many years except for one thing. I had to have more and more as time passed by because that void kept opening up wider and wider in between my high's.

Pretty much everything that transpired in my 20's and early 30's was a void. I shut people out I escaped problems and pain and I was not present for my own family. I became the one who voided out everyone else in my destructive path. I became The Void.

Then I met a Jewish carpenter who experienced that same void in his own unique way. He was mocked by others, even spit on and in a way separated from his own Father on a cross for a time. If anyone knew how I felt it was him. He knew the pain within me, he knew the hurt that helped widen that void, he understood what it would take to fill that void with something that was unavoidable.

It was the everlasting love of God, the incredible lengths of forgiveness, the amazing grace extended that was so unmerited that began to fill my void when I met him. It is so filling that it cannot help but overflow into the lives of others and from others to others. It is the answer to every void that anyone else would have for any other reason.

Maybe you too have felt it, maybe even feeling it now. I feel your pain, I understand, but He understands even better. He is the unavoidable answer right before us all to any question of why am I feeling this way?

​We just cannot fill that void without him.