There's a God in My Closet

Encountering the Love Who Embraces Our Skeletons

Ben DeLong

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532658716, 9781532658723
• eBook ISBN: 9781532658730
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Many have been taught to see God as a terrifying agent of wrath who spews anger at any sign of imperfection. At the same time, they've been taught that they are inherently flawed and devoid of goodness. Where does that leave us? For Ben DeLong, it left him hiding his skeletons from the monster he believed God to be. This proved to be a perfect recipe for anxiety, depression, and insecurity. But what if God accepts our skeletons? What if he actually embraces them in love? How would that change our outlook? For Ben, it changed everything. This book is about his journey to find what was always true: we are eternally embraced by God, skeletons and all, and he is never letting go.

Part I

Following the Pain Crumbs

Chapter 1

The Depressed Elephant in the Room

I’m just going to say it; life sucks sometimes. At times that’s all we can really say. We believe somehow it should be better. Somehow people shouldn’t be able to get away with being jerks (including myself), our family and friends shouldn’t get cancer, and children shouldn’t be facing life without enough food or clean water.

But these things happen, and it sucks. Even with decent parents raising us, we can still end up scarred and broken. Most of us didn’t have parents who intentionally tried to screw us up. I can’t imagine my parents ever sitting around thinking, “I wonder what we could do to Ben that would make a counselor a lot of money someday.” My parents love me and always have. That’s the case for most people, with some glaring and terrible exceptions. Even loving parents can leave scars, though. They often can’t see how their own insecurities and hang-ups influence the way they handle life and impact those around them. So we can end up with our own scars in the midst of good intentions.

Life can really suck, due to many different reasons, and often due to no one’s intended fault. I think we all understand that quite well. I was told, however, that there was a remedy for this, something that would take the sting away. And that something, or someone, was Jesus. The way many of us were taught to follow Jesus and to do life, however, eventually left something to be desired.

I was essentially taught that if I went to church, listened to the right music, read my Bible everyday, and surrounded myself with church people, then everything would essentially work out okay. The ugly truth that was often left out was that sometimes church people can do all these things and still be left depressed and bitter. Sometimes they can also be assholes (including me).

Now of course, when I say everything would work out okay, I don’t mean we expected everything to go smoothly. We were reminded often that “no one ever said it would be easy.” But we were assured that the joy we would experience would be incomparable. We were promised a peace that would be beyond our understanding. We were told of a love that conquers all.

The trouble came when those things didn’t seem to show up very often, if at all. Most of the time we just assumed we were lacking in our faith. After all, the Bible was supposed to be our instruction manual. If we can’t put the new product together, it’s usually because we’re not following directions very well. For example, Paul tells us in Philippians that if we pray with thanksgiving, we will experience peace. Thus, when we don’t experience the peace that Paul speaks of, we look over the instructions again and wonder, “Am I praying right? Am I really rejoicing always and being thankful?” It feels like an impossible standard. It is in the Bible, however, so we naturally assume we are lacking something.

Jesus seemed pretty generous in his promises, though. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would skimp on our blessings because we forgot to dot a couple i’s. He claimed to bring life abundantly. He even advertised that his yoke was easy and his burden was light. It doesn’t seem as though he was requiring a degree in rocket science to experience what he believed.

Yet, I seemed to be lacking that life most of the time. I wasn’t experiencing peace or joy, and I definitely didn’t know much about unconditional love. I ended up depressed, anxious, and incredibly insecure.

Life sucks sometimes. I get it. But my faith was not resolving any of my deep spiritual and emotional afflictions of depression, anxiety, and the like. In fact, it was making them much, much worse. And in some instances, my faith was actually causing them.

There was a big elephant in the room: I was depressed, and in many cases my underlined Bible was practically drawing the frown across my face. Eventually, I had to confront something incredibly difficult. My faith was not working. It was not coming through as promised. If I was going to experience what my heart truly longed for, I would need to give it up.

Standing Up To the Monster

When I was a teenager, I used to play baseball by myself in our backyard. I grew up in northern Iowa, where the nose hairs freeze in the winter and the beads of sweat flow in the summer. Just a couple swings of the bat in the sweltering summer were enough to wet my forehead. It was an elaborate event in my head. I would keep track of stats or have home run derbies. All the while I made sure I had the batting stance correct for the player I was impersonating. I was very adept at entertaining myself.

One summer, I concocted the perfect ball. It was a foam ball wrapped in a thick layer of duct tape. The tape allowed the ball to have a little weight to it but not so much that it would break a window. It remains, to this day, one of my greatest inventions.

One day, however, I was unable to find my specially crafted baseball. My only option was a ball that was made of hard plastic. “This shouldn’t be able to break a window,” I assured myself. So I ventured, somewhat reluctantly, out in the backyard to play.

I think my first few swings were unimpressive. A miss here. A foul there. It took a bit to get used to the new ball, but once I did, I jolted it. But as I was looking on triumphantly at my connection, I heard the dreaded sound: breaking glass.

My life flashed before my eyes. The house was a huge source of stress for my dad. He was a pastor, and we lived in the house owned by the church. Anything that happened to the house was seemingly a threat to his job and our livelihood.

Fortunately, he was not home when the catastrophe occurred. I ran to the house to assess the damage. At the time we had two panels for each window, and fortunately the main one was still intact. I convened with my mom immediately. She decided that, considering the unobservant nature of my dad (that’s where I get that from), we could just knock out the rest of the broken glass and close the main window without him noticing.

That worked for a while, for months even. But one day my dad was messing with the window and stumbled upon our secret. I did the only thing I could think of: run to my mom. I knew that she would stand up for me.

This is a pretty accurate representation of the way I approached my faith for much of my life. I ran to Jesus to protect me from the Father. There was a key difference, though. My earthly father might have yelled at me if I did something wrong. God, on the other hand, was apparently not opposed to extreme measures of punishment. I could never really anticipate the way God the Father was going to interact with me. Sure, he sent his Son for us. But if I was to believe that all of scripture was equally accurate, he was also a pretty volatile personality. We never know what we’re going to get with him. Sometimes he’s showering mercy; other times he’s commanding genocide. Sometimes he’s comforting the religious outcast who just can’t seem to measure up; other times he’s striking people dead for inadvertently breaking the rules.

In the afterlife, God’s character gets more concerning. Those on his good side are accepted. The meaning of being on God’s good side is somewhat mysterious in the understanding many Christians have of the Gospel, but I’ll get into that later. Even if we are included in the (seemingly) few who get in, we are still dealing with a God who treats the outsiders with an uncomfortable level of ferocity. Is God really going to throw sinners into a lake of fire? If that punishment was reserved for people like mass murderers, it would be a little more understandable. According to the Gospel that is often proclaimed by many Christians, however, it’s also going to be someone’s sweet Grandma, or loyal brother. It will be people who often are the epitome of compassion and kindness, but who simply could not bring themselves to confess believing in a God they could not see.

Some readers may be in sync with me. Others, no doubt, are uncomfortable with what appear to be sacrilegious questions. If you are the latter, I can assure you that in the past I would have been uncomfortable as well. The main point of being a Christian, however, is to live like Jesus. I don’t mean that we can be perfect and never make mistakes but, simply, that our lives can revolve around love, compassion, and truth as Jesus’s life did. I grew up within a tribe of Christianity that believes this is possible. The problem is that the Gospel we proclaim often has God telling us to love him, or to refuse and be tortured by him. That doesn’t sound inviting. Frankly, that sounds more like the plot to a movie about an abusive husband. At the end of the day, that narrative doesn’t help me live like Jesus. Instead it brings up fear and anger. I can’t trust a God like that.

This is a pivotal problem in the evangelical community, in my experience. We are told to cast all of our anxiety on God, to let him comfort and redirect us. God is supposed to be the one person we can run to when we screw up. When I have messed up, however, God has often been the last person I would turn to. He throws sinners into the lake of fire; what’s stopping him from doing the same to me? The way to peace is to run to God in times of trouble and failure, but his volatile nature often led me to run the opposite direction.

Many Christians, and others who are interested in faith, are very concerned about the God who is often portrayed in our gospel narrative. They believe there is something bigger. They see the benefit of faith in their lives or the lives of others, but something keeps nagging at them. How do we trust a God who so often seems two-faced in his behavior? How do we honor a God who seems prone to violence when that is the very behavior that is tearing our world apart?

There is a pivotal point to understand in all this. When people question the God we often teach and worship, many who love church and this faith can be offended. To them it feels like blasphemy to ask these kinds of questions. They might conclude that people are only asking these questions because we are being influenced by others. Or perhaps we are simply accessing our sentimental feelings and are...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Following the Pain Crumbs
• Part II: The Book Behind the Curtain
• Part III: Confronted With Our Illusions
• Part IV: You’re Not Who I Thought You Were
• Part V: Racing Toward the Starting Line
• Bibliography