On emptyness and lack | Promise to unroll the map

I’m coming back from a 2 month “sabbatical” from my job. I worked summers through college, so it’s the longest break I’ve had in about 6 years. The month I spent in Greece was the most picturesque part, but the month at home that followed was equally transformative. My friend Emily asked me about the big, meaningful parts that people won’t know to ask about when I jump into normal life again. 

The break showed me that if you leave the country, you can try to pack light — but your unfinished stories will still come with you. 

Two months away is enough headspace to pull each story out of the bag, one by one, asking where they came from and where they’re trying to lead you. Solitude can feel like rolling my whole self out on the table: reading every story like a map and saying, point to the lack. Show me the empty places. Name what brings you joy and what feels unfulfilled. Tell me what you miss and the people you wish you never let go of.

It’s a good practice for identifying what’s making you happy and what isn’t working. It can leave me feeling more like myself than ever, or charting a course around what’s missing to go out and find her again.

I think we all walk around carrying empty places and unfinished stories inside of us. Maybe yours feel like deep longing or loneliness. Maybe it is an experience that didn’t fill you in the ways you thought it would. Maybe it’s a relationship running dry, despite how badly you wanted it to work. Or maybe it is questions without answers. Emily and I talk about this lingering lack of resolve as the “griefy feeling.” A mentor of mine used to say that we are all always waiting on something.

In the Bible, there’s a woman in Samaria who walks to a well to draw water. When she gets there, she finds Jesus waiting for her. He tells her about “living” water: springs that rise up inside us when we taste of God. If she drinks the water that God gives, he promises she won’t be thirsty again.

The story has a lot of symbolism, representing eternal life, what it means to be “clean," and Jesus’s interest in healing racial and gender division (read what would have been culturally expected at the time). But lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the well.

A show called The Chosen recreated this. The woman doesn’t know Jesus is the Messiah until they start talking. He shows her who he is by bringing up intimate details in her life — who she has married, who she’s left, her disappointments, divorces, failures. I can’t sit across from this woman and ask if she felt empty and lonely, but I can guess these were moments that broke her heart.

He doesn’t do this to shame her but to call her empty places into the light. They start the conversation talking about physical water but it’s clear he’s getting at something much deeper. Before Jesus shows the woman who he is, he reminds her of her own weariness first. He takes out her map and unrolls it himself.

The story of the Samaritan woman matters because you and I are not the first people Jesus has found at the well. He can handle the well. He is experienced and comfortable with it. He is not distant; he’s waiting in the empty places before we get to them ourselves.

I think if we don’t look for his face when we find ourselves at a well, we will move from one thing to the next and come up dry when they don’t satisfy us in a way that only heaven can.

I can’t rush the timing or flip ahead to the last chapter of my unfinished stories. I can’t fast forward to tell you how they end: how many years we’ll wait, why things didn’t end differently, if he’s going to marry the other girl. But I think it matters that we learn how to tell these stories when we are living in the middle. Before we have a perfect bow to tie around them. I think the world is hungry for people who will tell their story from a rooftop before they know how it ends.

There’s a section in Isaiah 51 about transforming a barren desert of ruins into Eden, God’s garden. I’ve heard about Eden for most of my life and don’t know why I hadn’t learned about this perspective before. Here’s what you’ll find if you look across different translations: 

“I will comfort Zion again. I comfort all her empty places. I will make her wilderness like Eden; her deserts like the garden of God. I’ll transform her barrenness, her mounds of ruins and all her dead ground. They will become places filled with joy and gladness. Thankful voices and songs.”

This means that Eden, the most fruitful and proliferate garden, doesn’t just pop up out of fertile soil that has never been tainted. Eden is planted and grows on top of the very deserts that we experience the lack; our feelings of emptiness and desire for more.

In Hannah Brencher’s new book, she points out Jeremiah 30:18. It says “the city will be rebuilt on her ruins.” Do not be surprised when it feels like something inside is starting to turn to ruins. It is not the last page in your story. Scorched earth turns into new life.

At the end of the day, I don’t think emptiness is the other side of the coin of abundance, but maybe rather it’s complement. Paul writes that “strength is made perfect in our weakness.” Our lack, questions, and unknowing are part of the equation. If we don’t attend to the places where we’re empty, we may not truly know what it means to feel whole.

Promise not to settle for the emptiness. Promise me you’ll unroll the map. Don’t settle for the lack in places that deserve honey and gold. He will fill it with himself before you even know why it’s there. Get honest. Be brave with what you find.