Hello Mullen's Miracles Community,

A dear, long time friend of mine, Tim Davis, takes time a few times a year to write some of the most compelling life  'ponderings'.  I met Tim years ago when I worked for Transamerica. At the time he was a PeopleSoft sales guy and then went on to Workday in sales.  We have always kept in touch, more than 25 years now. 

When Tim shared this writing with me, I knew I wanted to pass on to you, of course with Tim's permission.  

I think there are many times we all have felt the void.  The way Tim describes it and what he has done to identify and learn a healthy way to address is something that I thought might be beneficial to others and their lives

Please feel free to read, share and comment....

Your stories are always welcome :-)

Much Love,

Kathy

_______________________

September 17, 2026

I was six years old when our family traveled to Montana. We drove through Yellowstone and stopped at Old Faithful with the other tourists. We visited Missoula, one of the many places where my grandfather had hunted elk in his youth. Eventually, we made our way to Glacier Lake. We camped overnight near the lake and spent the afternoon exploring the surrounding area. My older brothers always led the way, not necessarily taking my age—or my curiosity—into account.

The lake was so still that it mirrored everything around it. I watched as a large bird flew across the water and landed in a tree along the shoreline. A small branch broke loose, and as it floated toward the lake, I watched its reflection on the water below. For a moment, the branch and its reflection seemed to fall toward each other. Then the branch touched the water, and the image disappeared.

Eventually, we found ourselves at the edge of a pass by the lake where we had to jump from one rock base to another. I stood at the edge wondering if I could make it. My brothers encouraged me to jump, but fear filled me. I could not set aside the fact that if I fell, I would certainly get hurt. After waiting for me for some time, my brothers continued down the path. I was left alone with a decision to make. Would I risk the fall, or run back to the campsite and spend the afternoon with my parents?

I looked down at the water again and saw my reflection staring back at me. I smiled. The little boy in the water smiled back. I finally decided I would jump before I fell too far behind. I shut my eyes and then realized that probably wasn’t a good idea. I took a deep breath and jumped…

I look back on those moments in my life when the gap seemed too far to clear. Usually, it wasn’t a physical gap. It was some kind of emotional gap that felt too far for me to comfortably cross. Eventually, I would find the courage to overcome the fear, and the gap would become something I left in my past.

Those gaps accumulate. And as I grow older, I realize that filling the gaps in my life never really filled the void.

The void is deeper than the fear that whispers to me when I come to a gap. When I face a gap, my memory can remind me of all the other gaps I have crossed. I can replay those moments and tell myself, You have been here before. You were afraid then, too. And you made it across.

But the void is different.

I cannot find the reel I need to play to remind myself that it will be all right. There is no rerun that assures me that things will work out the way they should. Maybe that is because the gaps in my life asks me to find courage. The void lies somewhere deeper.

As I grew older, I discovered that other men struggled with their own voids. The world often gives names to the things we use to fill them: alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, money. On Saturday mornings, I sit around a table with men who have spent their lives filling gaps while struggling with voids of their own. There are scientists, lawyers, doctors, carpenters, software engineers—men from almost every walk of life.

“The man takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man,” one of the men says.

For many of them, alcohol was what they used to fill the void. For others, it was drugs. Society has little trouble recognizing those addictions. We see the destruction they can cause, and when someone’s life begins falling apart, we know something is wrong.

My addiction was different. I have never struggled with alcohol or drugs. I tried to fill my void by making sure my name was first on the list. It didn’t matter whether it was a high school class ranking or being a leading scorer in football. I wanted to be first. That followed me into my sales career.

Every month, sales leadership would publish the rankings and broadcast them across the company. If my name wasn’t at the top, the darkness would begin to fill me. So I worked harder.  And when my name returned to the top, for a little while, the darkness went away.

Looking back, those rankings had become another kind of reflection. Just like that little boy looking into the still water of the lake, I looked at something outside of myself to tell me who I was. Only now, instead of water, the reflection came from sales rankings, recognition, awards and success. When my name was at the top, I liked the man looking back at me. The problem with a reflection is that it can only show you what is on the surface. It cannot show you the void underneath.

I spent more than thirty years chasing that feeling.

I chose never to pursue management because, looking back, I don’t think I could trust other people with something I had come to depend upon so deeply. If someone else’s performance determined whether I won, then someone else had control over the thing I was using to fill my void. So I stayed in sales. And every January, something remarkable happened. Thirty days earlier, I might have finished the year as the number one salesperson. I had accomplished exactly what I had spent the entire year pursuing. Then the rankings went back to zero, and so did I.

The achievement that had meant everything to me thirty days earlier could no longer give me what I needed. The void was empty again. That is when I began to understand something about the men sitting around that table. I tell the men who chose alcohol or drugs that perhaps the biggest difference between their addiction and mine is how the world responds to it. Society condemns theirs. It rewarded mine.

Nobody stages an intervention because you work too hard. Nobody worries because you made more money this year than last year. Nobody pulls you aside because your name is at the top of the rankings again. The companies we work for congratulate us. They give us awards. They give us more money. And then they give us another mountain to climb.

That doesn’t make achievement wrong any more than having a drink makes someone an alcoholic. The question is what we are asking these things to do for us. I was asking success to do something it was never capable of doing. I was asking it to fill the void. For those of us who spend our lives trying to fill that void, peace cannot come from simply finding a better thing to put inside it. Sometimes we discover that only after losing something important. Sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom. And sometimes, perhaps more dangerously, we can spend an entire lifetime doing it without ever hitting bottom at all—because the world keeps rewarding us for it.

That is why, for the last eight years, I have spent Saturday mornings sitting around a table with a group of men in a Panera, working through the steps of addiction. No one sitting at that table can make another man confront his void. You have to see it yourself. You have to become willing to question the thing you have spent years telling yourself you cannot live without. You can continue telling yourself and everyone around you, I don’t have a problem. I did. After all, how could success be a problem? But eventually I had to confront what all those years of achievement had failed to accomplish. I had crossed gap after gap after gap and the void was still there.

Oswald Chambers wrote about the danger of taking even the good things God gives us and using them for our own satisfaction. His answer was not to reject those blessings, but to be willing to pour them back out to God. I think I spent much of my life doing the opposite. Achievement was a blessing. Success was a blessing. The opportunities I was given, the career I built, the recognition I received—none of those things were the problem. The problem was what I asked them to do for me. I wanted them to tell me I was enough.

So I held on to them. I measured them. I ranked them. And every time I received another one, I immediately began pursuing the next. I thought I was filling the void. Perhaps instead I was feeding it. There is an enormous difference between being grateful for something and needing it. One allows you to hold it with an open hand. The other makes you terrified of what will happen when it is gone. For more than thirty years, I was afraid to open my hand.

At six years old, standing on that rock in Montana, courage was exactly what I needed. I saw the reflection of a little boy who had not yet explored the void but only knew of the gap. I took a breath, jumped, and landed on the other side. For much of my life, I thought every problem could be solved the same way. Work harder. Overcome the fear. Make the jump. Get to the other side. There is great value in learning how to cross the gaps in our lives.

But I have finally accepted that the courage I used to cross those gaps will never fill the void in mine. I discovered the void lies below the surface like the branch that I watched fall and disappear into the water’s depths. Maybe the void was never asking to be filled with something I could accomplish. Maybe it was asking me to finally let go of all the things I had been pouring into it.

For me, that meant surrendering the very things I had spent a lifetime holding on to: my success, my recognition, my need to be first. Not because those things were wrong, but because I had asked them to become something they could never be. I asked these things to fill the void, to become my Higher Power. And when I finally stopped asking achievement to give me what only God could give me, I began to understand what I had been searching for all along. In Christ, I found something I could never earn, win, achieve, or prove.

Peace.

-Tim Davis

He has redeemed my soul in peace from the battle that was against me. Psalms 55:18