The Empty Places We Carry

Think back to your school days for a moment. Was there a sport you loved, a club you joined, or an activity that filled your afternoons?

For me, it was cheerleading, music, and dance. Piano lessons, singing, and ballet filled many of my afternoons through middle and high school. I can still feel the cool piano keys under my fingers, hear voices warming up before a performance, and catch the faint smell of the dance studio floors after practice. I really wish I had stuck with ballet, but that’s beside the point. Ha!

School events had their own rhythm: the music, the crowd in the stands, the excitement that seemed to hang in the air. Standing there performing or cheering, my eyes would sometimes drift toward the audience. Not because my parents weren’t there, they always showed up for me, but because something inside still felt a little incomplete.

Both of my sisters had already left home for college while I was still in elementary school. Their absence left a space in our home that never quite felt the same again. Life kept moving forward, and I stayed busy with school and activities, but every now and then that empty place made itself known.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that feeling meant. Looking back now, those early moments quietly shaped the way absence settled into my heart. As the years passed, life filled in around those feelings. School, friendships, adulthood, work, and raising my own family became the focus. Those early empty places didn’t disappear, but they softened and drifted into the background of everyday life.

Then years later, another loss brought them rushing back in ways I never expected. When my daughter passed away, the house felt unfamiliar. One morning, I walked into the kitchen and stood there longer than usual, staring at the counter where backpacks and breakfast plates used to pile up. The room was still, but my thoughts were not. Questions circled through my mind again and again.

What should I have done differently?

What could I have changed?

In that moment, old thoughts that had lived quietly in the background for years began rising to the surface again.

Thoughts of abandonment. Thoughts of never being enough. Thoughts of not being invited. Thoughts of never getting it right. Thoughts of not being lovable.

They didn’t arrive all at once. They slipped in slowly, repeating themselves until they began shaping the way I saw myself.

That season opened my eyes to something I had never fully understood before: the incredible power of our thoughts. Curiosity led me to begin studying the way our minds work and how beautifully God designed our brains to function. Honestly, it surprised me that graduate school had never covered any of this. No one had explained how deeply our thoughts influence our emotions or how strongly they shape our experience of life.

As that learning unfolded, patterns in my own thinking became impossible to ignore. My mind kept circling what was missing: the people who had left, the moments that couldn’t be changed, and the life I wished had unfolded differently.

For years, part of my heart had been holding on to those empty places, almost as if something inside me was still waiting for life to return to what it once was.

One day, a question surfaced that I couldn’t ignore. What am I truly seeking in those empty places? The pause that followed felt honest.

For so long, my attention had been fixed on what was missing. My mind kept returning to the places where people had left, the relationships that had changed, and the things that never turned out the way I thought they would.

And slowly, something began to make sense. All that time I had been looking toward who wasn’t there. And completely missing the One who had been there the whole time. My Heavenly Father.

He never left. He never walked away. Even in seasons that felt painfully lonely, His presence remained steady and close.

Looking back now, moments stand out where His hand was quietly holding things together in ways I couldn’t see at the time. In the middle of loss, confusion, and unanswered questions, He was still there. Still near. And sister friend, maybe you know what it feels like to carry empty places too.

Maybe some people didn’t show up the way you hoped they would. Maybe there are moments in your past that still whisper old stories about who you are. Those thoughts can take root before we even realize it.

For years, the stories repeating in my mind said I wasn’t enough, that I had been forgotten, and that something in my life had been permanently broken. But slowly, as I began paying attention to my thoughts and replacing those messages with truth, something inside me began to change. Not all at once. But little by little.

The weight began to lift. The noise inside my mind softened. A new way of seeing myself began to grow, not through the lens of what had happened to me, but through the lens of who God created me to be. That truth changes everything. Life isn’t defined by what we lost or by who walked away. It is shaped by the purpose God placed inside us from the very beginning.

He created you intentionally. Your life matters to Him. Your story matters to Him.

And the beautiful part is this: He has never left your side, not for a single moment. Maybe today is simply an invitation to stop staring at the empty places and begin noticing the One who has been walking beside you the whole time.

It’s time to seek Him.

It’s time to seek your truth.

It’s time to renew your mind.

With love and encouragement,

Robin