Crucified and Still Hiding

Most believers I know keep a drawer.

You wouldn't call it that. You'd call it privacy, or the way you were raised, or just your personality. But it sits at the back of the house, and you have walked around it for years.

What's inside depends on the person. A resentment so old it has its own furniture. A hunger to be noticed, to be the one the room turns toward. A voicemail from your father that you have never deleted and never played. A dream you told God He could have, while making sure He never touched it.

You can love Jesus honestly and keep the drawer. You can lift your hands on Sunday and lead the small group and cry in the car on the way home, and the drawer stays shut through all of it.

We get good at managing it. We call it a season, or a struggle, or a thorn, and we ask God to help us cope. Coping is a different request from opening.

Opening means being seen, and I don't think that is the real fear. Most of us have been seen badly our whole lives and survived. The fear sits one level lower. If He takes what is in there, will anything of me be left?

That question has kept more people from God than any sin I know of.

Look at what happens in the Song of Songs. Her beloved comes to the door at night and puts his hand through the opening. He doesn't force the bolt. The hand just waits there, where she can see it. She gets up, and when she reaches for the lock her fingers are wet with myrrh, running over the handle.

Myrrh shows up at a birth and again at a burial, and I think both are meant here. Whoever opens that door to Love comes away carrying the fragrance of a wedding and a grave together. Nobody mentions that on the way in. The songs skip it. But anyone who has truly let Him into the back room knows that smell.

Something dies in there.

It isn't you. It is the stand in you built, the false center. The little government you set up the year you decided no one was coming to protect you, so you would do it yourself.

That government kept you alive through things you have never told anyone, and it deserves some respect. Jesus gives it more than we do. But it was never built to rule, because it runs on fear, and fear can only defend. It has never once loved anybody.

Paul said it almost in passing. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. He wasn't describing self improvement. He was describing an execution and a new tenant. We hung that verse on a wall as a poster, but he meant it as a change of address.

So what does Jesus do when you finally open the drawer?

He doesn't shame you. People are always surprised by that. You braced for the lecture and it never arrives. He picks up whatever you have been guarding, the resentment or the image or the secret, and He looks at it the way a surgeon looks at something he is about to remove. Completely serious, with no disgust at all.

Then He takes it.

Picture a woman who has carried one conversation for twenty years, the one she would give anything to take back. She has confessed it. She has been forgiven for it. She has taught Bible studies on forgiveness. And still, every time she is alone in the car, she replays it, because replaying it is how she keeps paying. Somebody told her the payment was already made, and she nodded, and she kept the drawer.

What she wanted was a renovation. A little repair, a fresh coat of paint, the same floor plan. What He brought was a resurrection, and a resurrection begins at a tomb.

There is grief in this. When something you have leaned on for thirty years is lifted out of your hands, your body reads it as loss, because it is a loss. You may feel hollow for a while. You may reach for the old reflex at the old hour and find nothing there. That doesn't mean you failed. A root has been pulled and the soil hasn't filled in yet.

Don't cover the space with ministry or noise or another plan with good intentions. Heaven does some of its best work in ground you have stopped defending. It takes longer than people say it will.

Then one morning you are lighter than you expected, and you can't say exactly when it happened.

You never realized how much strength went into keeping that room. The watching, the managing, the careful editing of what people were allowed to know. It all went to guarding a counterfeit, and with the counterfeit gone you have more life than you thought.

Desire starts to move. You would rather be unseen and near Him than applauded and far from Him. A Tuesday morning with the door closed and nothing happening begins to feel richer than a conference. You find patience for a person you had written off, and you can tell the patience isn't yours.

This is what the old writers meant when they called holiness a fragrance. It isn't a performance of being good. It is what a life smells like after it has been near something that burns.

There is a cost, and you deserve to hear it.

He will ask for the drawer. Not the tidy version you have prepared for company. The real one. He tends to ask on an ordinary day, when you are tired and hoping to coast, in a parked car with the radio off.

What you say in that moment will shape your life more than any decision you make in public. So settle it now, while your hands are steady.

Jesus, I'm finished managing the drawer. I don't understand everything in it, and I don't know who I will be without it, but You have never lied to me. Take what I have been guarding. Take the name I have been building. Take the corner of the house I told You was off limits. I would rather smell like myrrh and have You than keep my own fragrance and lose You.

Come in.

All the way in.

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