DESPAIR

Sometimes it gets extremely dark in the tunnel. All of a sudden, just when we think we see a light at the end, instead it turns out to be a train coming right at us! Such is the hopeless, fatalistic view of a desperate person.335

It is no accident that we describe lives without Jesus Christ as “empty,” because that is exactly what they are. The world today is suffering from what Dr. Carl Jung calls “a neurosis of emptiness.” He says, “When goal goes, meaning goes; when meaning goes, purpose goes; when purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.”336

A skeptic wrote in his autobiography: “What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night, and in the emptiness sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is the voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns and the world seems to be quite dreadful. The unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they endure it.”337