Across An Ocean Of Dreams

Blank spaces scare me.

No, but seriously. My body breathed a sigh of relief as I decided to fill this page with that first sentence. There’s something about emptiness that fills me with fear.

I go about my days with this mentality in mind. As a college student now, I fear a blank schedule, and so I fill it with classes, clubs, food, and friends. My dorm room is the life of the party and I’m rarely ever alone–even when I’m studying.

The other day I had a free night where there wasn’t anything going on around campus, all of my friends were busy, and I was overcome with panic as emotions I had been suppressing by my busy-ness began to arise in my heart. I panicked and started wandering around until I found someone to hang out with, once again “dodging the bullets” of having to deal with my emotions.

I don’t spend a lot of time being still, because I am afraid of emptiness – and emptiness is all I feel underneath it all.

Have you ever found yourself in this situation? I know that if I leave myself alone too long, I begin to feel with my entire being this emptiness that makes my body ache. There is this underlying emptiness in everything I do and everyone I see, and that scares me.

I keep thinking that I should be filled with joy, or anger, or something that doesn’t involve a deep numbness. When my friends approach me in one of these moods, and I tell them I feel numb and empty, most of the time they tell me, “That’s okay.” I didn’t get why that was “okay” until a couple of weeks ago.

When the flyers went up for the freshman retreat, I was hesitant to go, but I signed up anyway. It had been 3 years since I had been on a retreat, and thought that it might be nice to not be on campus for a weekend.

At the retreat, the priest gave us a meditation sheet and told us to go off by ourselves to pray for a while, and I realized that I had left all of my prayer materials all the way across the camp in my cabin. So for the first time since arriving at college, I was completely left alone with God. All that was between myself and Him was a meditation sheet and a desire to not reveal my emotions. 

I sighed, opened my hands and heart, and gave Jesus full reign of whatever was inside of me. As I sat there, what began as an emptiness turned into what I named “serene poverty.” I felt as if the emptiness and the peace just plopped down side-by-side within me, and although I was still empty, I had come to a place of peace with it.

The next morning, we received another sheet with a prayer called “The Valley of Vision,” and my eyes began to tear up as I read it:

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells, and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine; Let me find thy light in my darkness, Thy life in my death, Thy joy in my sorrow, Thy grace in my sin, Thy riches in my poverty Thy glory in my valley.

I spent an hour praying with the phrase “thy riches in my poverty.” I couldn’t get over how applicable that was to my heart in such a profound way. The night before the retreat began, I called one of my good friends in tears. As I shared how I was doing, he stopped me and told me to stop doing and be still. I didn’t want to, but as this weekend progressed, I began to recognize the importance of blank spaces, of emptiness, of poverty.

As I prayed, the Lord showed me the beauty of emptiness, especially in His resurrection. The most beautiful poverty I have seen is the empty tomb on Easter morning. Can you imagine being Peter, running into the tomb, and feeling the depths of its poverty? And yet, I wonder if there was some sense of peace intertwined with that spirit of emptiness, just as it had intertwined in my heart.

If you are that person struggling with this poverty, don’t fight it. If you feel empty inside, stop filling it with noise and leave it empty. St. Therese of Lisieux said to the Lord,

There are times in our lives when Jesus is specifically allowing you to feel that blank space, so His name can be written in that space with the depths of His love. In the depths of your emptiness, you are filled with the riches of the Lord. In this past month as I’ve been working on being at peace with this emptiness, I have had so many people share with me how peaceful and joyful I appear, and are shocked to learn that my prayer life has consisted of this poverty.

Instead of feeling discouraged, I can’t help but smile, for I see in the midst of my poverty, Christ is shining all the more brightly in my life. I encourage you to be still (turn off your iPhone, put away your journal, whatever you sometimes use as a distraction from your emptiness) and know that He is filling you with the riches and the fullness of His grace.

Written by NET alumna Melina Birchem