empty

I officially said goodbye to my daughter whom I had driven to Michigan to go to school and then began the 2000 plus miles long drive back to Tucson. I started crying somewhere in New Mexico. It always takes me awhile before I look eye to eye with how I feel - but I do get there. I am uncertain as to what moved me at that point - there were many things bundled up with my emotions about letting my daughter go ... saying goodbye to my brothers and their families after a great weekend, saying bye to my mom who was sitting in her room at an assisted care apartment, perhaps it was the deaths of two very significant and much loved men this week both of whom I will greatly miss. It could have been how much I was missing my wife and my other two kids back in Tucson. Truth is, I was thinking over all these things and as I did so i drove mile after mile  - it all looked so desolate and empty. I drove through southwest Kansas which seemed  to go forever and then cut across the Oklahoma panhandle, across the corner of Texas and then i took a 2 lane road from one corner of new Mexico to the other.... empty.

Empty - I suppose that is the word that best describes how I felt - I was thankful for where my daughter was going to school and my time there only reinforced my sense that she had chosen well - but without her there is an empty place. Apart from my family on both sides of the country there was an empty place. So I cried.

As I cried I remembered that Jesus had emptied Himself (Phil. 2) and that he had put aside glory, heaven, even His rights - He chose to be separated from the glories of heaven and eventually even separated from the father as He hung on the cross - He emptied Himself so that I could be full. Eph. 1 tells us that we  - the body of Christ - are the "fullness of Him who fills all in all."

Thank you Lord for all the wonderful gifts of events and experiences and people that fill my life and thank you for the reassuring reminder that when those things are absent - you still fill me!