Are we empty?

Dear Family...

Daniel loves stickers. In fact he loves them so much that the time will come when we hope to use stickers as a motivation tool to make good choices; i will let you know, i am sure, how that works out for us. But he loves stickers. LOVES THEM!

So i bought him a sticker book, by the way it took me a long time to find this sticker book, but i was as giddy as a kid opening gifts on Christmas when i found it. It is an ocean book full of the fish and mammals one finds in the oceans, and you stick the picture of the animal on the appropriate page; it helped him learn a lot about sea life. I was glowing watching him tear through the book, putting down the stickers, and laughing hysterically through it all. Daniel was happy, and i was proud of him.

But then he came to an empty page. It should be said that there were only a limited number of stickers, just enough to accentuate the books literary pages, but when Daniel found the empty page, he began ripping the stickers off and pasting them on the blank sheet. I didn't want to stop him, because he was creating something artistic, at least in his mind. But as i sat there and watched him empty the page of stickers and overwhelming a blank sheet, i realized something. We don't like emptiness.

We have an empty room; we clutter it with junk. We have a blank wall; we decorate it with pictures, paitings, or whatever we can find to turn what we deem boring into colorful and life-giving. Its not only visual, though, is it? How many of us are ok with silence? What do we do when we sit with someone, and there is nothing but complete silence? Who breaks the awkward feelings first? Who cuts through the veil of silence with a song, a word, or a joke? Someone will, because we have to clutter our lives, whether visually or audibly.

But it is more than that too. Jesus tells the parable of the man who was freed from a demon, only to have that demon return, finding the house empty, and completely destroying the man, making the man worse off than what he had been before the exorcism. Why? The man's house was clean. In order. And he had found a way to be at peace with the emptiness, so how did the demons get the will to destroy him?

Because when it comes to our souls, our lives, our beings, we have to fill it with something or we are just shallow zombies that belong in a movie being chased around by someone who likes to double pump us. We are more than clones or shells. There is something of tangible depth in each of us, and if we find ourselves chained to an addiction or haunted by a demon, and God frees us, but we don't fill that new freedom with God, we become an empty shell, a zombie.

The danger of zombieland? Demons destroy zombies for sport. But it doesn't matter if we are recovering from an addiction or demon possession; we can inhabit zombieland when and if we do not engage God, actively, on a regular basis. We can and do get stuck in ruts of daily routines and grinds, while missing out on the vitality and beauty of God, which is all around us. When we become zombies; God becomes colorless at worse, grey at best. So when God frees us from whatever our demon might be; we have to make an intentional effort to spend our lives conversing with God, studying God's word, and loving God's children. When that happens, like Daniel decorating the blank page, God adds so much color to our lives that we become that new creation.

Being new is always better than being a zombie, besides who wants to be hunted by Woody Harrelson anyway? Amen.

Shalom,
jerry