For months now, I have felt like a lost soul. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, aside from living day to day and taking care of my responsibilities. I don’t have much in the way of goals; I have no vision for the future, no idea of what I want it to look like.

In a few months my life will change dramatically: I’ll go from living with my four boys, to just one of them. It’s time for that to happen, and I think it’s good, but what will life look like after they’re gone? What will it look like in two years? In four?

Maybe it’s this nagging emptiness, this lack of vision, that strengthens the pull of useless distraction. I use social media, and, even more so, the news to fill my mind with thoughts. It isn’t that I don’t want to think my own thoughts, it’s more that I don’t want to feel the emptiness.

Genesis 1 says: “First this: God created the Heavens and Earth——all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.”

My life feels a whole lot like a soup of nothingness, an inky blackness. In another translation it says that Earth was formless and void. That sounds like my life too——not how it appears on the outside, but how it feels on the inside.

Into that formless void, God spoke, “Let there be light” and there was light. And God kept right on speaking things until there were stars and trees and birds and humans. Into the nothing, God spoke, and set in motion the creation of all things.

I want to see this emptiness of mine as not just hollow but hallow ground. I want to be brave enough not to cover it up, to feel how empty it feels. I want to let hope live in the hollowed out space and wait for God to speak into my nothingness. I want to believe he broods like a bird over my own watery abyss and soon he might create something out of my nothing.