A Letter to the Skeptic Who Feels the Emptiness
I remember sitting in my car after closing a deal I'd worked weeks for.
Inside the office, people were celebrating. Handshakes, back slaps, someone already talking about dinner reservations. I smiled through all of it, said the right things, then walked to the parking garage alone.
And sitting there in the driver's seat, engine off, I felt nothing.
Not tired. Not stressed. Just... hollow. Like someone had scooped out the place where joy was supposed to live and left an echo instead.
I'd done everything right. Checked every box. Built the life that was supposed to mean something. And in that quiet car, in that concrete garage, I finally heard the question I'd been drowning out for years:
Is this it?
The Name for the Emptiness
The ancient thinkers had a word for what I felt that night. They called it maya. The great illusion. The haunting sense that everything we chase, everything we build, everything we white knuckle grip is somehow not quite real. Not quite solid.
Like trying to hold water in your fists. The tighter you squeeze, the faster it slips through.
I'm not here to sell you religion. I spent years allergic to anything that smelled like blind faith. But I've also spent enough nights in that hollow silence to know that pure materialism wasn't filling the hole. It was just teaching me to ignore it.
Maybe you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you've stood in the middle of your own success and felt like a stranger in your own life. Like you're watching yourself from somewhere far away, going through motions that used to mean something.
If so, keep reading. This is for you.
The Observation We All Avoid
Let's start with what we can agree on, even if it's uncomfortable.
Nothing here lasts.
Not your possessions. Not your achievements. Not even your relationships in their current form. The promotion you sacrificed your weekends for will be a bullet point on a resume nobody reads. The car you saved for will rust in a junkyard. The body you maintain will betray you, slowly at first, then all at once.
This isn't pessimism. It's just paying attention.
The Buddhists noticed it. The Stoics noticed it. The writer of Ecclesiastes noticed it three thousand years ago when he wrote: "Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless."
If you've felt this, you're not broken. You're awake.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Here's where it gets uncomfortable.
If everything in this material world is passing away, if our achievements dissolve and our pleasures fade, then we're left with a question we'd rather avoid: What, if anything, remains?
The Eastern answer is often dissolution. The self is illusion too. Let it go. Merge back into the cosmic everything and find peace in nothingness.
But here's what I could never shake.
If the self is illusion, then who is the one watching the illusion? If consciousness is just a trick of firing neurons, an accident of evolution, why does it feel like the most real thing I've ever experienced?
And why, if we're all just matter in motion, does the emptiness hurt so much?
The Ache That Won't Stay Quiet
There's a specific kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone.
You can feel it at a crowded party, surrounded by people who know your name. You can feel it next to someone who loves you. You can feel it in the middle of your greatest success.
It's the sense that you're homesick for a place you've never been. That there's a word on the tip of your tongue you've never learned. That somewhere, somehow, there's a version of life where things finally make sense, where the ache finally stops, where you finally fit.
C.S. Lewis, who spent years as an atheist before becoming one of Christianity's most articulate voices, put it this way:
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
I remember reading that sentence for the first time. I had to put the book down. Because he'd named something I'd been carrying for years but never had words for.
What if the emptiness isn't a malfunction?
What if it's a homing signal?
Eternity in Your Chest
The ancient Hebrews had a different word than maya. They spoke of olam. Eternity. And they believed something audacious: that God had placed eternity in the human heart.
Not as a concept. As an ache.
That restlessness you feel when everything should be fine but isn't? That hunger that success doesn't feed and pleasure doesn't satisfy? That sense that you were made for more than this, even when "this" is everything you thought you wanted?
Maybe that's not a bug in your programming. Maybe it's the truest thing about you.
Maybe you were built with a God shaped hole, and you've spent your whole life trying to fill it with things that were never meant to fit.
The Man Who Claimed to Be the Answer
I didn't come to faith because someone argued me into it. I didn't lose a debate and surrender. I came because I finally got honest about my hunger.
I wanted meaning that didn't evaporate by Monday. I wanted love that didn't depend on my performance. I wanted to know that consciousness wasn't just cosmic accident, that the "I" looking out through my eyes actually mattered to someone, somewhere, somehow.
And then I encountered a person who made the most audacious claim in human history.
Not "here's a technique to escape the illusion."
Not "here's how to accept the meaninglessness."
Not "here's a philosophy to numb the ache."
But: "I am the way, the truth, and the life."
Jesus didn't offer escape from reality. He claimed to be reality itself. The logos. The Word. The underlying logic of everything that exists. The voice that spoke the universe into being, now speaking in a carpenter's accent to fishermen and tax collectors and prostitutes and anyone desperate enough to listen.
And here's what wrecked me: he didn't come for people who had it figured out. He came for the hungry. The empty. The ones who'd tried everything else and found it all turned to smoke in their hands.
"Come to me," he said, "all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."
Rest. Not another achievement to chase. Not another box to check. Not another self improvement project to fail at. Rest.
The Invitation That's Been Waiting
I'm not asking you to abandon your intellect. The thinkers I respect most, Augustine, Aquinas, Dostoevsky, Lewis, Tolkien, were rigorous minds who found that faith deepened their questions rather than silenced them.
I'm not asking you to pretend away your doubts. I still have mine. Some mornings they're louder than others.
I'm just asking you to be honest about the ache.
If the material world leaves you hungry, maybe that's information. If achievements feel hollow at the center, maybe that's data. If love feels like it should be eternal even though nothing else is, maybe, just maybe, that's a clue.
The maya observation is correct. This world, as we experience it, is passing away. Everything you can touch will turn to dust.
But what if that's not the end of the story?
What if there's something on the other side of the smoke? Someone?
What if he's been waiting for you to get tired enough to finally look up?
"Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened."
That's not a threat. It's not a sales pitch. It's not fine print on a contract.
It's an invitation.
And it's been standing open for two thousand years. Waiting for you to get hungry enough to walk through.
I don't know where you are tonight. Maybe you're in your own parked car, in your own concrete garage, hearing your own silence for the first time.
If something here resonated, I'd love to hear from you. Not to debate. Not to convince. Just to listen. Sometimes the most important journeys begin with a single honest conversation.
You don't have to have it figured out. You just have to be hungry.
That's enough. That's always been enough.
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