Brian Jones

Black holes, many astronomers believe, are big holes in the universe that act like giant vacuum cleaners sucking whatever gets close enough to its immense gravitational pull.

Black holes suck into their gravitational field small things like dust, meteors, and household pets, as well as large things like planets and stars. Astronomers believe the gravitational pull of black holes is so powerful they even suck light into their center. Astronomers tell us that Black holes begin their lives as giant stars that eventually lose their fuel and collapse, imploding so fast and so hard that they somehow create this big hole like an “Inny” belly button in time and space.

To describe this process they use big words that I have to look up in dictionaries, so it helps me to simply picture a basketball that loses air so fast and collapses so hard under its own weight that it turns into a vacuum cleaner hose. That’s the black hole theory in a nutshell.

No-one knows exactly where the dust and planets and stars that supposedly enter a black hole eventually go. Most astronomers believe they travel through “worm holes” and empty out on the other side of the universe somewhere. My best guess is that it all gets dumped in New Jersey somewhere, but that hasn’t gained widespread acceptance among astronomers yet.

To me, the soul of someone far from God is like a newly formed black hole—empty and consuming. It’s as if the human soul has a gravitational thirst of its own. It knows it is empty, so it tries to consume whatever comes into close range in a futile attempt to fill itself.

Some people try to fill that void in their souls with acceptable things like an education or career or kids or a two-car garage in the suburbs. Others try to fill the void through harder things like alcohol or drugs or sex or fame. Whatever the fix, that’s all it turns out to be, just a temporary fix. It never actually fills the void.

What makes matters worse, or better, depending on how you look at it, is that God recognizes our emptiness, and does something to make us even emptier—he sends trials into our lives. To the empty soul God sends things like diabetes and corporate downsizing and marital disharmony. With each trial the black hole in our souls widens and grows and swirls with even more foment and agitation. Eventually we get to the point where we’re throwing Jupiter size fixes at the holes in our hearts and they don’t even phase it, and God smiles, because it is all a part of his plan. God knows that at some point we’ll figure out that the void can’t be filled with anything from this world and we’ll hopefully start looking elsewhere.

Trials and hardships are like large stars that go into the black hole and expand its emptiness. Astronomers believe that the entrance to some black holes expand to 10,000 times the size of our own sun. That’s what my soul felt like before I was introduced to Jesus. Each time he placed hardships in my path it was as if my void grew. 

When I wasn’t a Christian there was emptiness at the core of who I was. I could feel it. It felt a like a mixture of loneliness and fear. My days were like a script out of a strange movie where I was the central character. I had amnesia and couldn’t remember who I was. In this movie I had a best friend that was looking for me. I could feel his absence. The day I suffered a blow to the head, it didn’t change my heart. At the time I didn’t know that what I was missing was God, I just knew something was wrong.

I understand that black holes are just a theory, but it reminds me a lot of the soul of someone far from God.

Maybe it describes your heart right now.