The Emptying: Finding Yourself by Letting Go

You give everything you have,

and in the moment you reach the end of yourself,

you find that God has been holding you the whole way.

My favorite thing to do is ride my bike.

As a child, I would ride it on gravel roads growing up out in the Midwest, where there was nothing but tumbleweeds, humid summers, and the occasional grasshopper that would jump onto my leg while I was pedaling. Later, as a teenager, I would end up riding it down neighborhood streets in sunny California, past homes lined with palm trees and people walking their dogs. Eventually, as a young mom, I would ride it along the beach path with my children where I could watch the ocean waves crash against the shore, an endless expanse of water where the sky never seemed to meet the end.

And my favorite part was always the same. I would push as hard as I could on the pedals until I built up enough speed, and then I would let go. I would let the bike carry me further down the road without any effort, my hands raised in the air while my hair moved with the wind. There was nothing left to do in that moment. It was pure joy, pure freedom. Looking back now, I think it was something more than just a childhood memory. There was a kind of emptying that happened there, a release that I didn’t have words for at the time but felt deeply in my body.

There is something about that kind of emptying that stays with you.

It shows up in life in quieter ways, usually after you have given everything you have to something, after you have pushed and carried and tried to hold it all together. There comes a point where there is nothing left to manage, nothing left to control, and something in you loosens its grip. It doesn’t land as defeat. It feels like relief.

Moriah Wilson, a professional gravel cyclist, once described that feeling in a way that is hard to ignore:

“As the pitch kicked up, it was time to dig in and try to find that elusive next gear that is within us all. So I shut my brain off and let my body take over, channeling every fragment of energy into my legs. I pushed my pedals as hard as humanly possible. I kept going to that deep, dark place of complete emptiness. This is one of the feelings I believe every bike racer lives for, the emptying. It's a beautiful paradox, emptying yourself can be such a fulfilling experience.”

That kind of emptying doesn’t happen by stepping back too soon. It happens when you’ve given everything you have, and only then begin to realize you were never the only one carrying it. Although he life ended too soon, Moriah's profound words resonate because they reflect a kind of effort most people recognize. There are moments where you push, where you give everything you have, where you move past what feels comfortable and into a place that feels almost empty. That kind of exertion is not foreign to the spiritual life. Scripture never presents it as passive. There is a pressing forward, a kind of participation that requires something from us.

What she describes reaches a point where effort alone can no longer carry you, and something begins to shift. The emptying she names does not come simply from pushing harder, but from arriving at the end of what your own strength can produce. In that space, whether she names it or not, there is a kind of release that follows.

The spiritual life reframes that moment declaring that you are not pedaling alone.

We know that effort matters right alongside of engagement. There is a call to step in, to keep going, to remain present when something is difficult. Alongside that effort, there is something deeper and steadier—the presence of God, not watching from a distance, but actively at work within you.

When you reach that place of emptying, it does not leave you abandoned or depleted. It reveals something that is easy to miss, that the strength you thought was entirely your own was never yours alone to begin with.

Scripture speaks into this in a way that feels almost backwards at first. In Matthew 16:25, Jesus says that whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Him will find it. That kind of language doesn’t fit naturally with how we tend to live. In fact, everything in us leans toward preserving, protecting, and holding on. Yet Jesus points to something different, something that only becomes clear when you reach the end of your own ability to sustain it.

The same idea shows up again in Philippians 2, where it says that Jesus emptied Himself. He did not cling to position, status, or control, even though all of it rightfully belonged to Him. He released it out of obedience and love, trusting the Father fully in the process.

That kind of emptying is easy to misunderstand. It isn’t about becoming less of who you are or disappearing into passivity. It is about letting go of what was never meant to define you in the first place. Control, pressure, expectation—these are the things we carry as if everything depends on them, and over time they begin to feel necessary. They were never meant to sustain you.

Most of the time, this kind of emptying doesn’t happen in dramatic ways. It unfolds quietly in the middle of everyday life. It looks like releasing the need to manage every outcome when things feel uncertain. It looks like loosening your grip on how something should unfold when it refuses to follow your expectations. It looks like recognizing when continuing to push is no longer what is needed, even if pushing has been what got you there.

There are seasons where you are called to press in, and that effort matters. There are also moments where continuing to press only keeps you from seeing what God has been doing all along.

Emptying may not be found in choosing between pushing and letting go. It may come through moving all the way through the effort until you reach the end of yourself, and in that place discovering that you were never the one carrying it on your own.

I got on my bike again recently. It had a basket in the front, pink on the sides, the kind of bike that feels like it belongs to a younger version of your life. As I rode along a path surrounded by trees, with the quiet of the forest settling in around me, something familiar returned. The sound of the wind, the rhythm of movement, the sense that nothing needed to be forced in that moment.

There it was again—that steady kind of peace.

It wasn’t overwhelming or dramatic. It was simply present.

There you are, I found myself thinking, as if it had been missing all along.

There is something about release that brings you back to what is true. Not a new version of yourself, but something that has been there all along, waiting beneath everything you have been trying to hold together.

You were never meant to carry everything. You were never meant to hold your life together through effort alone, piecing it together with whatever strength you could gather. That kind of living will always leave you exhausted.

What you were made for is different.

Maybe that “more” is not found in striving harder or becoming something new, but in returning to what has always been true. When you begin to let go—of control, of pressure, of the belief that everything depends on you—you do not lose yourself in the process.

You find yourself there.