Choose Your Pain

Fifteen years ago or so I wrote a song that included the words, “Where your dream should have been // now is an empty space // so you rummage around // to find something to take its place.”  (Not sure I’m so keen on predicting ones own future, really.)  If you have successfully found something to take its place, you won’t “get” this, but if you’ve failed to do so, you will agree: there is very little in life that is as painful as an empty space.

Perhaps the most obvious Biblical example of this is Abraham.  An old man, he receives a promise from the Lord of great blessings.  If you’re living with an empty space, you’ll feel the heartache in Abraham’s response.  “What can you give me,” he says, “Since I don’t have a son?  A servant born in my house is the heir to everything I own!”  The hole in his life was so gaping that it didn’t even matter what else God had to offer him—much less what the world had to offer him—the hole would still be there.

I’m not sure of the address, but I’m sure it’s there.  God said, “Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.”  But He doesn’t say when.  Will it be right now?  A month from now?  Year from now?  How about ten or twenty years from now?  And from now until then, the pain of a wide open, empty mouth … who can survive it?  At least, that is what we think—which of course is why the Lord never tells us we’ll have to wait that long.

There is another side to this that we don’t think about when we’re rummaging around, to find something to fill the empty space, and stop the bleeding of our soul.  If we don’t have an empty space, there is no place for the dream to live when it’s time for the Lord to give it to us.  Almost two years ago, I began to build an addition on my house, propelled forward in part by the realization that my house would be too small for me and someone else.  Now I have a fairly large, beautiful home, with a lot of … empty space.  I’m happy to have the house, but I cannot possibly describe how painful some of that empty space is.  Unless you have empty space somewhere in your life, you won’t understand how painful that empty space is.  BUT … there will be no pain when the time comes for the empty space to be filled, entirely because that space is empty.

The simple truth is that the son of the slave woman cannot be an heir alongside of the son of the promise.  If you’ve brought in a replacement to fill the empty space, that replacement will have to go when the promise comes, and that will be painful, too.

Choose your pain; you can’t avoid it entirely.  Hurt now, or hurt later.

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