I’m reading “Into the Depths of God” by Calvin Miller during Lent.. I’m reading other things, too, but I have had this book since 2001, and only read the introduction several times–never getting any farther. So one of my goals in Lent is to read and finish this book.
In Chapter 1 (yay, I got past the introduction!) Miller talks about what it is that keeps us from having an appetite for God instead of an appetite for other things… why we do not succumb to self-sacrifice in the name of Christ as often as we might like to, or think we might like to. One of his reasons is the sin of “living too distant from the Great Enabler”…. filling ourselves up with other things, ideas, people.. instead of with God. Emptiness, Miller suggests, causes us to fill ourselves up with other things–the seven deadly sins, for instance. He says Pascal was right, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in our lives that only God can fill.” Even Christians, Miller says, can have these vacuums…and these vacuums come only from neglecting our relationship with God.
“When God fills our inner vacuum with his Holy Spirit, life works.”
Not sure what I think about that statement. I guess it depends on what “life works” means. Admittedly, I have a God-shaped vacuum.. I am in need of God, and I do not always fill that need with God. I fill it with TV, with food, with tears and words of complaint, with other relationships. Not that these things in and of themselves are bad, but when they replace my relationship with God, then I need to do some re-prioritizing.
And yet, is there room for a vacuum left by the loss of hope and dreams? The vacuum of my single friends who return home to an empty house? The vacuum of my life which has no children at home? Is this life working? Or do I just need to do what I’ve been trying to do–move forward despite the vacuum, even though the vacuum has not been filled? And what does it say about me that my vacuum is still here, even though supposedly God and God’s spirit could be filling it?
