Void Fillers

If I can be honest, I baked a 24 pack of sugar cookies yesterday in honor of the lovely blizzard we had and I had eaten all of them but two by 5 p.m. Yeah…I know. There’s some relevance, to this just follow me. On snow days you have a ton of idle time and eventually it gets to a point where there are only but so many movies you can watch on Netflix, so many loads of laundry you can do with hopes that the power won’t go out, and you get tired of the impromptu hair day you decided on last minute. The other side of having tons of idol time is that it gives you an opportunity to be left alone with your thoughts. The silence gets a little bit louder and God starts tugging on you to talk to Him about the matters of your heart. This is when the cookie eating started; I knew there was something I needed to give to God but I didn’t feel like opening it up and dealing with it. So what did I do? Watched movie number 2 and ate a few more cookies. When that “feeling” came back I ate a few more cookies and as you can tell this cycle continued on for the rest of the day until I had ate all of the cookies. No I’m not the cookie monster and no I don’t even have a sweet tooth like that but it made me feel better….temporarily, as I continued to go back for more. 

                It’s nothing but a void filler; I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that I used to do this with “retail therapy” and isn’t it funny how we replace one void filler with another. It can be the smallest things that we don’t even think about that we seek to comfort us and make us feel better instead of turning to God and allowing Him to heal our hearts. We continue to turn to other things and people to make us feel better yet we keep coming up short because we choose God to be the last solution. All along He’s waiting for us to just turn to Him instead of all that other stuff and pour out our hearts to Him. First John 1:9 tells us that if we confess our sins that God is faithful and just to forgive us. However, we won’t do this because sometimes deep down inside we don’t believe this to be true. We feel as though what we’re dealing with is too heavy. We look at the situation and we think we’ve made a mess of things so instead of dealing with the mess we hope that it will just go away and we won’t have to deal with it. It won’t go away; ignoring it won’t make it go away. That emptiness, that tug on your heart, that pull, it will continue as you continue to pacify it with void fillers that aren’t Christ. We can’t be made whole using imitation things to fill our hearts. It just won’t work because there’s nothing like the real thing! Void fillers drag out your freedom in Christ because you fail to realize that if you would just give that issue to Him, you wouldn’t have to keep going back to the counterfeit that only “fixes” the problem temporarily. 

                I was having a moment the other day where I was thinking about how I needed to clean up my room and I started to think about how I really don’t like cleaning (yes I know I need to work on my domestic skills but that’s neither here nor there lol) and I wondered why is it so hard for me to get motivated to clean up? God hit me with the reason is because your mess doesn’t bother you. You don’t have a problem with it as long as no one else sees it. It’s not until someone’s coming to visit that you decide to clean up so you wait until someone is coming for you to get ready. The problem with that is you don’t know when Jesus is “coming to visit” so you can’t wait until He notifies you to start getting ready. You always have to be ready. We can’t afford to prolong confessing our sins to God in hopes that we can deal with it later. Later does not come for everyone; now is the opportune time.