Smooth plastic casing slipped through her hand just in time to tap the hollow heart underneath the picture. Another like. But of course that post didn’t need it. 104 was already enough. Her gut sank at the sight because her last picture had only gotten 71 whole hearts. Likes.

“Why don’t I have the money to travel?” she yelled to the empty room. Maybe then she would be liked.

“And why can’t I be loved?” Her frustration turned to anguish as she directed her plea heavenwards.

The last of the flower petals fell from his hand onto his mother’s grave, each sending up microscopic dust tornadoes that mirrored the storms in his heart. This was the fifth year without her. It hadn’t gotten any easier.

“Why did You take her?” he gritted in grief as a lone tear glided down his cheek.

Empty hearts pervade streets and schools, houses and hospitals, looking for some kind of cure to the chunk missing from their heart. They have too many words, and yet not enough. They search for a way to verbalize their condition to the world—a united plea.

So many of us possess the cure, the antidote to the world’s problems, in the palm of our hands, yet selfishly hoard it for ourselves or simply feign its existence.

Would we really rather death and emptiness overtake them? Or do we just fail to open our ears to their united plea?

Oh they’re there—those words Jesus heard a thousand times: help me, heal me, save me. Yet we ignore these words as if they were never spoken, forgetting we have the power of the living God inside us. We plan our daily lives to avoid other’s brokenness, hoping to escape unscathed by poverty. But the very situations and people we try to avoid to satisfy our “comfortable” lives are precisely the situations and people WE were before we found the cure that is Christ.

No, today I refuse to stand here any longer pretending life is cool, calm, and collected while the world is banging on my door, demanding to know where I found the cure. This time I will point them to the old rugged cross where It Is Finished and my battle is won. I will point them to the torn veil of the temple that proves the Spirit of the Living God lives within my heart, and can live within them, too. I will show them the empty grave that proves Jesus had the power to overcome the nasty sin that was encrusted upon my heart and the physical death that I will inevitably suffer. I will tell them of the victory I have in Christ—the way He has renewed my life, thrown away my anxiety, obliterated my discontentment, and forgiven me forevermore. I will tell them, that I, too, had an empty heart once—one obsessed with self, full of deceit, and broken. But I will tell them my empty heart has been filled by my Savior Jesus, the only hope of life eternal.

My empty heart is full. I will proclaim it until I die.