Void

[Chaplain Steve Fox]

When I was Chaplain at Florida State Prison I had the opportunity to visit the "death chamber". I'll describe it a couple of ways.
As I entered the chamber I felt as if I wore a gown and mask-- was just taking everything in as if thru binoculars or "virtual tour" - you know, there, but not there.
Then a new sensation hit me. I couldn't tell if it was an overwhelming presence of evil or a vacuum, or void, of anything good. It left me frozen.
I guess I could describe it another way -- Your wallet falls out of the boat to the bottom of the lake. Your told the lake is 10 feet deep so you'll dive in to retrieve it. You take a breath and head down discovering that the lake is more like 25 feet. You get the wallet and start back up -- you only calculated air for 20 feet. You don't have air to make it to the top -- that's what I mean by "void". That day I realized that the times I preached about the death of Christ and His cry, "My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken Me", that I had no clue what it meant.

He left everything in Heaven to replace our void