With our belongings loaded onto a ship for the journey back to the U.S., I find myself sitting among the dust bunnies on the floor of our vacant Tokyo home, pondering the significance of the past 24 beautiful and complicated years.
The farewells are over, our missionary roles are finished, and our friends and coworkers are moving on to form new teams. We don’t belong here anymore, but we don’t belong where we are going, either. With our youngest child off to college, the term “empty nest” feels painfully apt. The sudden absence of our children seems to amplify the void within our marriage, echoing the emptiness pervading our house. Oh, how I feel like a hollow shell.
As the breath painfully catches in my chest, I search for an escape from this lonely place. I long to fill my mind with the short-lived satisfaction of streaming and scrolling. That familiar numbness calls out to me, though I know they are but empty calories for my soul. But what else can I do?
A C.S. Lewis quote springs to mind: “We should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town, seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day, find the most dismal and dripping wood…” In short, Lewis is calling us to lean into our pain. And so looking around my lonely and vacant house, my place of “dismal and dripping wood,” I return to the hard floor and cautiously face my emptiness. In the ache of separation and the uncertainty of what lies ahead, I recall an Asian proverb,“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.” -Tao Te Ching.
Despite the loss of all that filled this home and all that will be left behind, this new void is an opportunity. While I hate the feeling of emptiness, I know that God is in it. “He put you through hard times. He made you go hungry. Then he fed you with manna, something neither you nor your parents knew anything about, so you would learn that men and women don’t live by bread only; we live by every word that comes from God’s mouth.” (Deut 8:3 Message) Often, He Himself brings seasons of hunger, thirst, and loss because “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.” (Matthew 5 Message)
Emptiness is the key to fullness. In His infinite wisdom, God allows transition seasons to facilitate transformation. In emptiness, we discover God’s fullness—a fullness that transcends temporal comforts and ministry accomplishments. And so, as we begin our hunt for a new home, I cling to this truth that sometimes God must empty our lives before he fills them afresh.
