AUTHOR: Robin Dugall DATE: 4:06:00 PM ----- BODY:

When I was a kid, I had a very powerful and vivid secret. Some may call it some type of spiritual sensitivity…others just a few fries short of a “Happy Meal”. I knew that God lived in my closet. Now, that may come as a surprise to you considering that God living in my closet means that He was not hanging around your life. But that’s not the point. This was not a kind of “exclusivity” that comes from me holding God captive as if He were in this world only for me. This is just the experience of a kid who wanted to keep God as close as I could without having Him constantly in my face. I didn’t know what God did with all of His time while He was in my closet and I wasn’t around. All I know is that when I needed Him, He was there! The truth is, if God got out and helped out other people and ran the world (stuff like that), I didn’t know about it. All I knew was that it was simply the best to have God around when I need Him. I could tell Him my problems and He would listen. I would tell Him what I wanted and how He should make me famous and rich and popular. And He would smile. I loved having God around when I needed Him. I can’t think of one reason why it wasn’t the best thing a boy could have in his life until…until God started doing something besides just listening to me and taking care of my problems. When God started poking His head into all the issues in life which I felt He had no business THEN God became a problem! Believe me, I still liked the convenience of having Him there. I have to admit, when I needed something, God was just a few short steps away. I could open the closet door, take a seat in there and talk away. At other times though, it was better keeping the door closed…in fact, locked! For some reason God kept getting out of the closet when I wanted Him to stay in there. And every time He got out, man, would He cause me problems. I would have an argument with my mom and dad and there was God, looking at me like I should be doing something that I was not doing. Then there was the time when I told my mom that I was someplace when I really wasn’t there…some of you might call that a lie…I call it just something that had to be said so that I wouldn’t get in trouble. As I was telling my mom what I knew would get me off the hook, there was God again. I thought I had locked the closet door when I left the house that morning…I must have forgotten. God was there again with a look that made my telling of that lie more painful than I imagined it was going to be. I tried to give God the “stink eye”; you know the look like, “get back in that closet or else”. But He kept popping up at all the wrong times. Sooner or later, I would need something, open the closet door and God would want to talk about a bunch of stuff that I would have rather ignored. He called them “sins”. He said that each broke His heart. He said that I could be forgiven and if I trusted Him and let Him out of the closet every day, that He would walk through my life with me and help change me into a boy that would be beyond my wildest dreams. I didn’t know about that. I kind of liked it when God was right where I wanted Him. Until that one day, I’ll never forget it, where God broke out of the closet for good. In fact, the closet door was completely and totally destroyed. I tried to fix it before my dad saw it but I couldn’t. That meant God was out…in fact, He was out for all to see. He was out and I couldn’t put Him back in. Since then, I’ve grown up. To tell you the truth, I like that God isn’t still in that closet. In fact, I love it that He is around all the time even when He makes me uncomfortable. But He is showing me stuff that I could have never imagined in my entire life. He is telling me dreams for my life and my world that still give me shivers thinking about. I’ll have to think about that…maybe it would have been better letting Him out of that closet a long time ago.

-------- COMMENT-AUTHOR: Kristin COMMENT-DATE:12:08 PM COMMENT-BODY:Great post!!! Thanks!!!!!!! -------- COMMENT-AUTHOR: Anonymous COMMENT-DATE:11:29 PM COMMENT-BODY:Prof, you just described my entire existence up until basically yesterday. Thank you for this great visual to go along with my once nameless lifelong predicament. I have a closet too, and I keep God in it so he's close enough that he's there when I need him, but there's always been a door between us so I can shut him out at my convenience. How selfish am I? And how self-righteous to think I can do well enough on my own even for a second? Anyway, thanks again. God has really been using you and your class in my life this semester. --------