When Christmas has passed, if I find that I am none the better for having engaged it, the only explanation that I can muster up is that I can be handed the greatest of gifts, yet still have the emptiest of hands. And finding myself in that dreadful condition, I am left to assume that the fool within me has chosen to live with the hands that now define me instead of embracing the God Who wishes to fill me.

You can’t draw water from an empty well. And the oddity of it all is that if I dug it, it’s going to be empty. Maybe that explains why I’m thirsty and why I can’t take a step without falling into some hole.

If God is going to be all that He is, I must reach a point where I am emptied of all that I am. It’s only then that the fullness of God has space in the emptiness of me.

If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.

I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.

Maybe we don’t ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love’s grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe.

We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.

Space is the stuff that we fill, so sometimes we’d rather not have it because of the things that stand around the space eager to rush in and fill it to its edges.

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.