The Empty Bookstore

I had reserved the nights months in advance. The bookstore’s event calendar filled quickly, the good slots competed for and claimed almost as soon as they opened, and I’d managed to secure not one but two evenings for game nights. Over 30 people had RSVP’d between them. I’d been planning for weeks: pulling out games I’d been longing to play with a real group, the kind that need bodies around a table and don’t work with fewer than a handful of people. I spent hours preparing. Created materials. Organized everything with the particular care of someone who wanted the evening to be good, who wanted people to leave glad they’d come.

I arrived more than an hour early both times. Set up the space. Arranged the games. Waited.

No one came. Not one person. Either night.

The staff felt sorry for me. One of them gave me a free coffee, the small mercy people extend when they’ve witnessed something quietly humiliating and don’t know what else to do. It was summer, so there were reasons. Vacations, heat, the general scattering of people that warm months bring. Some sent excuses afterward. Many simply never responded at all, the RSVPs evaporating into silence as if they’d never existed.

I sat in that bookstore both nights, surrounded by games no one would play, and felt something I struggled to name.

It wasn’t just disappointment, though there was that. It was the ache of feeling unprioritized. Of having sunk hours into something that apparently registered as optional, skippable, not worth showing up for. Of discovering that what I’d treated as a commitment others had treated as a maybe.

It was the feeling of being disregarded. Not maliciously….. no one set out to hurt me. But the cumulative effect of 30 people deciding, individually, that this wasn’t worth their evening communicated something about where I ranked in the order of things. Below the heat. Below the vacation. Below whatever else claimed the night.

And underneath the disregard was something harder to articulate: I felt lost.

I’d poured time and energy and expectation into something that returned nothing, and I didn’t know what to make of the emptiness. Had I misjudged? Misread interest as commitment? Built something on a foundation that was never actually there?

The investment is what made it sting. If I’d thrown the nights together carelessly, the empty chairs wouldn’t have meant much. But I’d cared. I’d prepared. I’d let myself anticipate. And anticipation that meets nothing has a particular way of curdling into something that questions your own judgment about what’s worth investing in.

Here’s what I’ve been wrestling with since: sometimes I don’t know if God wants me to pivot when the pivot isn’t gradual.

I’m used to a particular kind of redirection from God. The exit visible in the distance, the off-ramp I can see coming and prepare to take. Or the blatant wrong in a sort of neon sign: the sin to stop, the harm to flee, the thing so obviously misaligned with God’s character that the only question is whether I’ll obey what I already know. These I can handle. The gradual exit gives me time to adjust. The obvious wrong makes the choice for me.

But what about the pivot that arrives without warning?

The sharp, sudden sense that maybe you’re in the wrong place entirely, doing the wrong thing, investing in something God never asked you to invest in? What about when the redirection isn’t a distant exit but an immediate one, and it doesn’t make obvious sense?

The empty game nights might be exactly this, or they might be nothing. A slow summer, bad timing, circumstance rather than calling. And that’s precisely the difficulty. I don’t want to confuse a slow season with a God-sent redirect. Reading too much significance into ordinary disappointment is its own spiritual error, the tendency to make every inconvenience into a message and every closed door into a calling.

Scripture shows God speaking through both pattern and puncture, and learning to distinguish them is part of mature discernment.

Sometimes He speaks through accumulation: the repeated closing of doors, the consistent thwarting of plans, the pattern that only becomes visible when you step back far enough to see it. Paul and his companions were “kept by the Holy Spirit from speaking the word in Asia,” then tried to enter Bithynia and “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” (Acts 16:6-7). The redirection came through a pattern of obstruction, door after door closing until the only door left open was the one toward Macedonia.

But sometimes God speaks through puncture: something sharp and sudden that cuts through your trajectory. Saul on the road to Damascus wasn’t gradually redirected. He was knocked flat, blinded, his entire life pivoted in a single violent moment (Acts 9:3-9). No distant exit. No gradual adjustment. Just sudden, disorienting reversal.

The empty game nights could be either. They could be one data point in a larger pattern: part of the same accumulation that’s been clearing my calendar and dissolving my social structures. Or they could be a puncture, a sharp signal that I’m chasing something God never assigned me, expending energy on game nights when He wants me somewhere else entirely.

I genuinely don’t know which. And the not-knowing is uncomfortable in a way that demands either premature certainty or honest sitting with ambiguity.

It’s not just game nights. That’s almost the easy part: a hobby, a logistics, a thing I can release without much agony if it comes to that.

The harder question is about friendships. There are relationships in my life that don’t particularly serve me but aren’t detrimental either: the gray middle, neither nourishing nor harmful, just present. Before my circumstances changed, maintaining them cost little. They existed in the natural flow of a life that had margin for them.

But my custody situation has eliminated the margin. Now keeping these friendships alive requires going out of my way, deliberately watering things that used to grow on their own. And I’m feeling the strain of it: the effort of sustaining connections that were fine when they were effortless but have become work now that effort is in short supply.

In some cases there’s been pushback.

I haven’t met expectations. I’ve been perceived as abandoning people, as failing to show up the way I used to, as letting relationships wither that others wanted kept alive. The disappointment of people who don’t understand why I can’t be who I was for them anymore.

This is where pivot becomes genuinely costly. Not the release of a game night, but the deliberate decision to stop watering relationships that aren’t bearing the fruit that justifies the increasingly scarce resources they require. To let some things die not because they’re bad but because I can’t sustain everything and have to choose.

Here’s what I’m learning about myself: I’m deeply resistant to this kind of pivot, and the resistance has a specific shape.

I’m used to being forced to give things up. Most of the major releases in my life weren’t choices. They were circumstances that removed options, leaving me to grieve what was taken rather than decide what to surrender. And when I have had a choice, it’s usually been an easy one because the situation was black and white. Leave the harmful environment. End the destructive relationship. Walk away from the obvious sin. These choices cost something, but the clarity made them bearable. When something is clearly wrong, leaving it is hard but not confusing.

What I’ve rarely had to do is choose to release things that aren’t wrong. To leave friends who aren’t toxic. To walk away from environments that aren’t harmful. To disappoint people who haven’t done anything to deserve disappointment. To leave opportunities and even money on the table not because they’re bad but because clinging to them would mean failing to cling to what God actually has for me.

This is a whole other level of faith. Forced surrender requires endurance. Obvious-choice surrender requires courage. But voluntary release of good-enough things in pursuit of God’s actual purpose requires trust of a kind I’m not sure I’ve had to exercise before: especially when what you’re clinging to is already so little.

That’s the part that exposes the depth of the challenge. When you have abundance, releasing some of it is easier; there’s more where that came from. But I’m clinging to what little I have left after a season that has stripped away so much. The game nights, the gray-middle friendships, the scattered social connections….. these are the remnants. And being asked to release even these, voluntarily, in faith that God has something else, feels like being asked to open my hands when they’re already nearly empty.

Jesus said that whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for His sake will find it (Matthew 16:25).

The paradox sits at the center of faith: that clinging is the surest way to lose, and releasing is the path to finding. But the paradox is easy to affirm in the abstract and excruciating to practice when the thing you’re releasing is already so diminished.

The widow at Zarephath had a handful of flour and a little oil, enough for one last meal before she and her son would die (1 Kings 17:8-16). And Elijah asked her to make him a cake first, out of the little she had. To release the remnant. To open her nearly-empty hands rather than clutch what little remained. The provision came after the release, not before. The flour and oil sustained because she let go of her claim to her last meal.

I don’t think the lesson is that releasing always produces miraculous replenishment. Sometimes you release and the thing is simply gone. But the widow’s faith wasn’t in guaranteed return; it was in the trustworthiness of the One asking her to open her hands. She released because she trusted the asker, not because she’d been promised a specific outcome.

That’s the faith I’m being asked to exercise, I think.

Not certainty that pivoting away from game nights and straining friendships will produce some better thing I can already envision. But trust that if God is the one asking, if this is calling rather than circumstance, puncture rather than coincidence, then opening my hands is right even when I can’t see what, if anything, will fill them.

I haven’t resolved it. I don’t know yet whether the empty bookstore was God’s sharp redirect or just a slow summer. I don’t know which friendships I’m meant to release and which I’m meant to keep watering despite the cost. I don’t know if my resistance to pivoting is healthy caution against over-reading circumstance or just my reluctance to surrender what I’m clinging to.

What I’m learning is that mature discernment often means holding the question longer than I’d like. Not forcing premature certainty in either direction, not declaring the empty nights a sign from God before I’ve tested it, but also not dismissing them as mere circumstance just because acknowledging them as calling would cost me something.

I’m watching for the pattern. Is this one data point or part of an accumulation? I’m examining my resistance. Is it discernment or just self-protection? I’m trying to distinguish the voice of God from the voice of my own exhaustion, which sometimes wants permission to quit things that are merely hard rather than genuinely wrong to continue.

And I’m trying to keep my hands open.

Not clenched around the remnants in panic, not flung wide in reckless abandonment of everything, but open: ready to release if that’s what’s being asked, ready to keep holding if that’s the assignment instead.

The pivot, if it’s a pivot, won’t announce itself with the clarity I’m used to. There’s no distant exit sign, no obvious wrong to flee. Just the empty chairs, the straining friendships, the sense that maybe God is redirecting me somewhere I can’t yet see, and the long, uncomfortable work of discerning whether that sense is Him or just the ordinary ache of a hard season.

I’d rather be forced. Forced is easier. But maybe being asked to choose….to voluntarily open hands that are already nearly empty… is exactly the faith this season is meant to build.