There is no sense of absence where there has been no sense of presence. What makes absence hurt, what makes it ache, is the memory of what used to be there but is no longer.

Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a beloved sleeper once lay. Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust. Absence is the overgrown lot where the old house once stood, the house in which people laughed and thought their happiness would last forever.

You cannot miss what you have never known, which makes our sense of absence–and especially our sense of God’s absence–the very best proof that we knew God once, and that we may know God again. There is loss in absence, but there is also hope, because what happened once can happen again and only an empty cup can be filled.

It is only when we pull that cup out of hiding, when we own up to the emptiness, the absence, the longing inside–it is only then that things can begin to change. It is our sense of God’s absence, after all, that brings us to church in search of God’s presence.

-from Gospel Medicine