In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a Not-So-Secret World
Essay 1
…Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
1 Thessalonians 4:11-12
In the middle of Missouri on a flat acre lot surrounded by fruit trees and poison ivy there sits a fairly decrepit house. The siding is mildewed. Green streaks run the length of the abode. Tiny saplings have sprouted in the gutters where helicopter seeds once landed and cozied into a trench of rotted leaves. They are a product of the midwestern greenhouse climate and an unhurried attitude of the dwellers below, a we’ll-get-to-it-someday approach often trumped by the more pressing concern of bushwhacking–er, lawn mowing.
It is summer. There is no breeze on this day, no relief from the humidity. The air is thick. The heat, relentless. In the house sits a woman, middle-aged, her head bent over the corner of a cluttered table. She is writing letters, paying bills, licking and stamping envelopes with an efficiency suited for an office receptionist. There is no air conditioning in her home, and an old oscillating fan slowly rotates its breeze in her direction, causing her short brown hair to lift slightly from her neck. She pauses, closes her eyes and arcs her back for a moment, enjoying the briefest respite.
She is my mother, and even 700 miles away I can see her in my mind. Nothing has changed for her in nearly thirty years. The bald cypress trees in the backyard are bigger, and there is a new puppy. But she makes the same trip to the clothesline on a beaten path every morning. She treads the same dewy grass, pulls the same old clothespins from the same old cutoff detergent dispenser, and hangs up the same old tea towels she’s always used.
Mom isn’t fancy. She doesn’t seem to need the things other people require for living. If pressed for an explanation on her simple life, she giggles, shrugs, blushes. To whom could she expound the benefits of burying dreams in the ground in pursuit of greater glories? Who would even listen? How could she possibly explain to the refined, climate-controlled, busy go-getters that she is content with a small teacher’s salary and summer poison ivy battles along the back fence? How could she begin to describe the thrill that comes from writing monthly checks at the kitchen table, giving money away instead of investing it in home improvement projects and the gaping, hungry mouth of self-indulgence?
How can she express the heart’s peace that comes from leaning into quiet, a life hidden?
It is a secret–this life holds more joy than can ever possibly be contained. Anyone who has ever had a grandma with a swinging screen door, pie on the counter, and a warm hug, arms open wide knows the fallacy in living loud. How could we walk away from Love, quiet and unassuming as it is? A wealthy man would sell his soul to be able to enjoy the menial, the anonymous.
Solitude. It is being home with oneself. It is coming home to Someone who wants you there, arms wide and welcome. It is a home you’d hate to leave. It is disdain for greener pastures.
I have been watching my mom live it for nearly four decades. It really is something fantastic and peculiar. Physical discomfort is her discipline, self-denial is her offering. Homebodying is her worship. To the casual observer it is unfamiliar. But I know exactly what it is: my mom radiates Jesus.
There came a point in the life of Jesus that he began hiding from the Jewish leaders. They wanted to kill him because he said outrageous things that undermined their know-it-all politics. But Jesus was popular with the nobodies, and so they followed him around to see what miracles and other tricks were up his sleeve.
As Jesus began to withdraw from the spotlight, his own brothers urged him to get out of Galilee and make a scene.
“You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” (John 7:3-4)
They were only brothers egging him on. They were humans pursuing human endeavors, and in their humanness they assumed Jesus was after what the rest of them wanted: popularity.
If they had been paying closer attention, they would have known his motivation for laying low. He told them,
“The right time for me has not yet come; for you any time is right. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.” (John 7:6-7)
I am always blown away by how Jesus didn’t give a rip about what people–even his brothers–thought of him. He rebuked those folks who tried to distract him, deter him, or otherwise diffuse his God-talk. He was always talking about his Father, and how “if you knew me, you would know my Father also” (John 8:19).
He was always talking about Home. His mind never strayed from the Father. He was comfortable bringing it up:
I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.
John 17:4-5
His brothers couldn’t understand his longing for solitude, His desire to be Home.
Many people won’t.
But I have seen it in my own mother, in her simple satisfaction. She walks to the clothesline, unimpressive and inconspicuous. She sweeps her old floors, mows the same lawn, gives money to the same charities. No one knows. It’s doubtful she will find glory here on earth, because she wasn’t made for it.
But someday there will be glory for her.
She is keeping secrets with God.
