Hollowness

Absorbed in his thoughts, Nathan wandered into the night. His boots crunched through dirty snow, the air sharp against his face. Strings of garish lights glorified mistletoe, reindeer, and a grinning imposter in red. The spectacle only deepened the sense of hollowness.

An unwelcome jingle echoed in his mind.

He replayed the reunion conversations, one after another, voices clashing inside his head.

Some announced with lifted chins, “There definitely is no God!” One insisted, “The world would be better off without religion.”

An unruly-haired friend spilled it out, “You remember how committed I used to be? Well, I stepped away.” His mouth smiled. Then he flung his hands outward, “There’s freedom in the vacuum!”

Freedom? Nathan frowned. He imagined an astronaut cut loose, untethered, tumbling in endless nothingness.

A young businesswoman had spoken with trembling voice. “My faith in God has melted away… evaporated…” A shimmer of tears betrayed more than she meant to show. “But I miss Him intensely.”

Another, once a proud atheist, muttered, “I used to be absolutely certain. But it doesn’t work for me anymore.”

One retired teacher snapped, her eyes flinty. “Of course there’s a God!” She condemned anyone who doubted with such finality that Nathan flinched.

Then a young couple said, smiling, “We can’t speak for others. All we know is that God transformed our lives.”

Their lingering words sharpened the fragmentation.

The reunion plastered cheap paper labels over faded memories. Titles, jobs, bullet points: CEO. Single mom. Methodist. Atheist. Two-dimensional. Paper lives. The vibrant youth group of a decade ago had been fed through a shredder. Strips and clippings of unbelief, longing, defiance, and faith scattered everywhere.

He trudged through the grey snow, haunted—thinking about classmates who’d walked away from faith.

Moral Reasons

Nathan remembered a strikingly handsome classmate who had defended his unbelief with intellectual bravado. But when he pressed deeper, another truth surfaced.

The man admitted with a smirk that couldn’t hide his embarrassment, that faith in God was inconvenient. It interfered with the pleasures he wanted, the invitations whispered in darkened rooms, the conquests he craved. His conscience couldn’t keep pace with his appetites.

So, he cut God out.

Nathan had walked away shaken. Belief can be lost not only through doubt but through desire. Sometimes people don’t stop believing because it isn’t true, but because they don’t want it to be.

Emotional Reasons

Another friend’s faith collapsed under crushing disappointment. She had invited a girl from a broken family to church, where a youth leader, protected by his family's position in the church, repeatedly touched her inappropriately. When the victim tearfully spoke up, leaders silenced her. The injustice, aggravated by the cover-up, crushed Nathan's friend, poisoning every thought of God or church.

Still another crumbled under grief. His father, a serial adulterer but also his closest companion, died suddenly. The idea of his dad facing eternal despair was unbearable. So he shielded himself from pain the only way he knew: by deciding not to believe at all.

Nathan clenched his fists against the cold. Faith doesn’t always break under logic. Sometimes it breaks under heartbreak.

Intellectual Reasons

One of the first people Nathan had spoken to at the reunion was now a teacher.

Her unraveling began with a student’s question: “Have you read this book?” It was by a well-known atheist. Chapter by chapter, her beliefs eroded.

She desperately paddled to keep her faith afloat, but a video lecture by the same author torpedoed what was left. Her faith sank to the ocean floor.

Nathan shivered. For her, it wasn’t rebellion or pain. It was logic against logic, argument against belief. And belief, she felt, had lost.

Gaining Faith

But not every story at the reunion was loss.

One classmate who used to wear a Darwin fish pin during high school told him how things shifted while studying genetics for her Ph.D.

She described staring through a microscope at the human genome, overwhelmed by its intricate design. “It’s impossible,” she whispered again and again. “No blind chance could weave such order.”

The deeper she looked, the more the evidence whispered, "Design." That search led her to Scripture. And there, in Christ, she found what she had longed for without knowing it.

Nathan walked on through darkness, her words battling other voices in his head. He stopped at the silhouette of a lone tree against a distant pool of light. Its bare branches reached upward through the darkness: an image more honest than any prayer he had muttered in years. He forgot how to breathe.

Could the same moral, emotional, and intellectual forces that pull people from faith also draw them toward it? The thought intrigued him.

That night, hunched over his laptop, he searched for something he had never thought to investigate: intellectuals converting to Christianity. The names stunned him. Leading minds of their generation were edging closer to Christ.

A paradox jumped from his screen. While faith hemorrhaged ordinary believers, a line-up of extraordinary minds was moving toward the very thing the masses fled. Spotting the paradox didn't fill the hollowness. If anything, it gouged it deeper.

Before bed, he scribbled a sticky note for his board:

Faith's Push & Pull

• Moral reasons
• Emotional reasons
• Intellectual reasons

Nathan wondered if he should add, Spiritual reasons. Before dozing off, he got up again to add a second note, this time on bright blue:

Snowman Jesus Paradox

While faith melts away for many,
some of the brightest see it crystallize,
solidify, and grow.

Why?

He woke up soaked in sweat. A nightmare again, the accident in slow motion.
A thousand 'Why's.

Why the accident?
Why someone so gifted, so loved, so young?
Why is he dead—and I alive?
Why do so many lose faith?
Why do others find it?
Why live? Why try? Why go back to work?

Questions without shape or answer.
He didn’t write them down. He couldn’t voice them.
He just exhaled them, half-formed, into the dark.

★

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