Cavities

The American Heritage College Dictionary defines a cavity simply as "A hollow; a hole."

I tend to think of dentists and drills and nasty black spots on teeth when I hear the word "cavity." A dark place where something good and healthy has been eaten away--a gross emptiness.

I think of the hole in my heart that I long to have filled with the love of a good man.

There are painful cavities everywhere--potholes on the street that damage tires, empty chairs at dinner tables where fathers used to sit before they left, dried up mud puddles where animals once could come and refresh themselves in the desert.

A void. A place that once held a bit of life and substance, but now falls short of expectation and need.

And yet, the status quo never changes if nothing ever moves and leaves a void to be filled. And sometimes cavities have a way of revealing beauty that before was trapped under the surface.

Empty space can be a channel. A way for something to reach point B from point A.

And they invite filling.

If you look carefully at a common garden slug, you might notice there is a hole on the right side of its body. This opening, called the pneumostome, is the entrance to an open space within the slug's body called the mantle cavity.   The mantle cavity wall is lined with small blood vessels that are empty of oxygen--a void waiting to be filled with a gas that gives life. This is the slug's lung, and as air flows through the pneumostome into the mantle cavity, oxygen moves from where there is much to where there is little--and the blood flows life around the rest of the creature's body.

How can we line the cavities in our lives with life-transporting conduits?

How can we take the empty, lonely spaces in our hearts and turn them into lungs that draw something good in and then infuse the rest of ourselves with that substance?

The slug makes a choice, you know. It can open and close the pneumostome. If it didn't act out of its God-given instinct, it could potentially refuse to let the air in--it could suffocate itself. The very word "pneumostome" comes from the Greek "pneuma," meaning "air," and "stoma," meaning "mouth." Air-mouth. Mouths are cavities. Mouths are hungry.

Where do we refuse to let the air in? Where do we shut down our own pneumostomes--our hungry air-mouths?

In my life, it's where I refuse to let the Holy Spirit in. 

Ann Voskamp, the author of my favorite devotional blog www.aholyexperience.com, has recently been writing about the season of Lent, and the beauty of being filled by God as we empty our life of something by "giving it up for Lent." For more on this, read http://www.aholyexperience.com/2012/02/the-secret-to-fasting-in-a-lent-that-is-failing/ and http://www.aholyexperience.com/2012/03/how-to-make-your-march-amazing/.

I have been convicted this Lent of shutting off the life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit from a very specific void in my life. I want to get married. I want someone to hold, someone to adore, someone to be my best friend, someone to share my journey with in all its messy, beautiful, intimate details. It's a painful emptiness.

So this Lent, I am focusing on filling that emptiness with Someone who enters voids. Materially, I have committed to listening only to God-specific or instrumental music when the choice is in my power--in my car or on the computer--for this 40 day season. Listening to human-centered love songs seems to widen the hollow within me most days, so I am taking a sabbatical from them. Emotionally, the battle for my heart is more difficult. Left to myself, I prefer to close the air-mouth. I prefer to suffocate in my pain.

But I am learning to relax those fear muscles that contract whenever I see him, desire him, and cannot have him. I am learning to let the air in.

I am cracking open the pneumostome.