TUCKER: Do you have space in your life this Christmas?

Ever fasted?There's a feeling you get in your gut every time you try and do it, and usually it comes pretty quick — within a few hours of your last nibble. It's a feeling of emptiness. Something's missing. We're sitting at our computer and we're now incessantly distracted onto that growing hollowness. We try and shut it out. We tap our fingers. Maybe go for a walk. Take a drink of water. It's unfamiliar to us, and hugely uncomfortable.And this goes for any kind of giving up: Youtube, post-8 pm screen time, or sweets for Lent. Or criticism, self-pity, gossip, negativity, apathy...shopping.Slamming Justin....Something pushes back when we restrict those things that we like to fill up on, indulge ourselves in, or let have control of us. We face a fierce kind of resistance. And its no small thing. The resistance wants to keep us at the status quo, at the comfortable acceptance, even if that means we're using ultimately unhelpful helps to psychological peace.If we could only learn that on the other side of that push-back, on the other side of the pressure there is something else: a place that is foreign to us and initially ugly, a physical and psychological gap, but a place nonetheless where God can come. Change can come. Peace can come. Gerald May, in his book Addiction and Grace, calls it 'spaciousness'. But let's make no bones about it: This place is not nice, at least initially. Its uncomfortable. Its what we know. So, a dog goes back to its vomit, and we would rather go back to the slavery of Egypt than move ahead into no-man's land. We might know that our addiction is hurting us in some way but, well, swimming upstream is just too hard.It's a strange fact of human nature that something in us resists our own health. Facing exams, grief, or tax season, we balance ourselves with coffee, the internet or painkillers, giving us the feeling — however temporary — of stability. We eat a box of chocolates because we got depressed, say. Five years later that becomes sleeping pills or opiates or gambling.It's no wonder that we balk when we try and give some of those things up. Nevertheless, if we are going to find health we've got to face and embrace emptiness. We have got to learn to go without. And wait.At the start of the pandemic we all saw people suddenly out on their front lawns playing with their kids. We were all barely driving. We had a slower life imposed on us, and many of us were hoping for a healthy shift in our society, where we focus on the things that matter, like time with loved ones.The spaciousness was too hard, though. The minute we had a chance, we returned to our ingrained societal rut — to 'homeostasis' — we filled up the uncomfortable emptiness.We are all addicted to filling up. Some parents do it by putting their kids into club after club. Some religious folks and ideologues do it with conventions, retreats, and books, one after the other.What would happen if we gave it up? We're afraid to try. Addiction comes in many forms, and those struggling with addiction know that we must meet the emptiness head-on. They know that in order to move ahead into freedom and to finding a truly healthy and sustainable sense of health, they've got to be comfortable with that empty feeling.Turn everything down in the house in order to hear the clock ticking.Maybe we'd do better this Christmas, to not fill up. Not fill our lives to the margins. Not buy as many gifts as the budget allows. But rather, draw back. Give ourselves time to stop. Have time to look people in the eye. Ask them in for dinner. Wait for empathy. Wait to hear. Resist the Siren song to our gluttonous materialism.And wait for something special to happen.

TUCKER: Do you have space in your life this Christmas?

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