Are You Empty?

Fill my hole with precious dirt, love. Till the soil and part the weed. - E. Schrody (aka Everlast)

Often I find inspiration from strange sources. Eric Schrody is a white rapper who speaks like a rapper sometimes. I wouldn't necessarily want Bat Jr. (not his real name) listening to Everlast CD's. However, Mr. Schrody seems to have traveled a spiritual path not traveled by most of us. This the guy that admonished us

"God forbid you'd ever walk a mile in her shoes, then you might really know what
it's like to have to choose."

The subject being abortion, of course. Ouch. Christians I know tend to squirm at that lyric. Yes, it's easy to stand outside abortion clinics and protest and hold signs up, scream and yell, "Abortion is a sin" etc, etc, but to actually embrace that girl confronted with a horrible "choice" is hard. I've always found that to be lazy faith anyway, abortion clinic protesting that is. Which leads to the topic; Are You Empty?

Faith is a veneer on some people. Beneath the thin skin is nothing, which would explain when that skin gets bruised or cut it falls away to nothingness. Today Rick Stedman with Adventure Christian Church talked about cleaning up one's act. There's one problem with cleaning up anything, however, is it gets refilled with something. The fetching Mrs. Guano (not her real name) and I recently steamed cleaned some carpets in our house. To do so meant moving funiture out of the room being cleaned. Just suppose for a moment that the funiture we moved out of the room was infested with cockroaches (it ain't but just go with it, alright?). What did we solve by refilling the clean, unoccupied, room back up with that same bug infested funiture? You solve nothing according to Christ:

"When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places
seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to the house I
left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied,
swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits
more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition
of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked
generation."

From Matthew 12:43-45. Notice the key word there - unoccupied. When I was wandering back in my college days, I bought several self-help books; The Art of War, Effective Persuasion, The Kama Sutra, etc, etc. The list went on and on. They got me nowhere. As Stedman said this morning, the word "self-help" is an oxymoron. No one has EVER helped themselves except to more of what's mine. I don't mind really, what's mine is yours but have the courtesy to ask. Jesus' parable above might as well have been His review of every self-help book ever written. To clean, to clean up one's act, to sweep up the dirt all by yourself leaves an empty house (your soul) behind. Yes, you've sweeped away the filth that resided in your heart - congratulations BTW - but what are you going to fill that empty space with now? Know that it will fill up.

Much of what we see in the world today is emptiness. We Americans look at the terrorists, who want to kill us in our beds, and are somewhat awestruck by the apparant ferocity of their faith. "They're willing to die for it. Wow! There must be a "there," there, right?"

Wrong. Terrorists are filled with what we all fill ourselves with. Their evil is unrepetant and seemingly irreversible. The difference is we terrorize ourselves with our own sin when we choose it over Christ. That can be reversed by Him. What kind of dirt have you filled your hole with? Let Him fill it with the kind that blooms and part the weed.