Well, if I wait a few more days it will be a whole year since I wrote anything on this blog...strange to look back over the year and take stock of what has happened...where I am in the journey...new boss, new co-workers, new way of doing my job and being with people in it...Trent is in Chicago for the summer as an intern at a major corporation in his field and has had a phone interview with the major player in computers and electronic devices...we are at a major transition point in his story...he will enter his senior year at Purdue this fall...and shortly become engaged and then inevitably he will be married...it is a change that I feel so many complex emotions about...grateful for the opportunities and the wonderful woman he has chosen...sad to have him gone from my life and uncertain about what the next stage will be like for him and for myself and David...will we experience loss of being connected to him and his story...what will that loss look and feel like? Zoe is working at the gallery here in Winona Lake...and is spending one day a week with her Joe either here or in his hometown 1 and 1/2 hours away...she will go to her second year at college this fall...studying studio art...my Joe...our Joe is entering his Junior year...only a short step from his senior year, graduation and leaving for college himself...we are on the brink of the empty nest...emptiness was the topic on Sunday at church the image I received was of vessels being made of clay and situated in sand...we were made to be empty...to receive...and perhaps to be filled before pouring out to fulfill out intended purpose...somehow Adam and Eve punctured the design...some might say "ruined" the usefulness of the containers...I wondered if God uses those flaws to pour THROUGH us somehow...so that we are constantly leaking the Spirit of God...and yet never feeling full...never experiencing fullness...what if faith is believing that he is at work through us even though we do not experience him? We might never feel the fullness that he might have initially intended due to the sin-hole that drains away the felt presence of God...yet we know he is in us...he constantly pours out himself for the good of all...what if we try to plug that hole with all the wrong things and for all the wrong reasons? What if we simply accept that we are broken...allow the experience of our emptiness to draw us to the truth? That his Spirit is at work in us and in the world...that our God is bigger than our experience of him...what might it mean to embrace the brokenness and trust the outpouring of the Spirit and not interfere by trying to plug up the hole so we wouldn't experience the emptiness? What might it be like to enter into the process with him? Might we see the leaky hole differently? Could it be possible to stop avoiding emptiness and call it good? Might we tune in to the flow of the Spirit through us and sense his presence somehow? Might there be a way to embrace the process without knowing the outcomes? We know the ultimate outcome...but it takes faith to trust in him when we do not experience any of it or of him in the moment.