Skeletons In The Closet Quotes

But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.

I may not have any skeletons in my closet, but I do have a little box of souls in my sock drawer. —T-SHIRT

Gone is the boy with the guns and the skeletons in his closet. These hands holding me have never held a weapon. These hands have never touched death. These hands are perfect and kind and tender.

One dark night the skeletons that they had carefully hidden in an obscure closet appeared, grabbed them around the throat, and strangled them.

My dear sister, you can’t escape God, and you can’t escape your skeletons in the closet. They will always be there until you take them out from behind those dusty old moth-eaten coats. Your exterior facade of ‘everything is alright’ only works for a little while, and then the cracks begin to show. You can only hide behind yourself for so long. You can’t keep running!

Everybody's got skeletons in the closets. Every once in a while, you've got to open up the closet and the let the skeletons breathe. Half the time, the very thing you think is gonna destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about. My advice to people with skeletons is to dust them off every now and then-- as long as your closet's aint full of them. It's not good to have more than two or three.

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.

Any man who isn't married by thirty-five is either gay or he's got skeletons in his closet.

No. . .I mean, I'm sorry he. . .You know, said those things to you." "It's part of being a 'good' family. Everyone's got skeletons in their closet.

As human beings we govern our actions with our deepest fears. But if you name that shit, you claim that shit: let enough people into your closet and you'll find there's no more room for skeletons. Leave yourself nowhere to hide and you can live your life unguarded.

We doubt in others, what is in fact in ourselves. The skeletons in your own closet are the things that scare you the most about others; people who come from a background of lying are suspicious of lying in others and so on and so forth. The most trusting of people, are not people who have never been betrayed or who have never felt pain; but the most trusting of people are those who in themselves do not find those things worthy of that blame. We see the world through the eyes of the condition of our own souls.

It's early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet.

Okay, I'll admit, I have a few skeletons in my closet; but they weren't skeletons when I put them there.

Hell, even the straight people have enough skeletons in their closet to fill a tomb. Everybody’s too afraid of going to hell or getting made fun of to be honest about what they want and who they are, so they can’t even really admit what they want to themselves.

Six hundred years is an awfully long time, Ever. So long it's impossible for either of us to imagine. Though it is more than enough time to rack up a few dirty skeletons for the old metaphorical closet, right?

I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.

People need to stand up for their wrongs, as they stand up for their rights.

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best take it out and teach it to dance.

I think most people treasure the skeletons in their closets. We want them to remain unrevealed for a reason.

When it comes to politics its not about who is corrupt its about who is been caught, because they all have skeletons in the closet.

You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with...skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.

I’m a closet sociopath. You can tell by all the skeletons I have hanging up next to my clothes.


Don't give me truth, just give me gossip And skeletons from people's closets, I wanna be normal And millions buy it, I am blinded by The SUN.

Secrets. Everyone has them. The light of day and truth reveal some secrets to be nagging obsessions or habits, while other secrets may be as incriminating as a literal decaying skeleton in one’s closet.

Everyone has skeletons in the closet, and those who claimed otherwise were usually the ones with the most to hide.

Most skeletons in the closet don't have wings. - Conner Bailey, to Alex Bailey

There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.

I want all the books on the shelves. I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does.

I love crafting. Knitting, decoupage, scrapbooking, any "lady-ish" art form, I'm a fan. For about six months each. Then I shove all the supplies in a closet, alongside the skeletons of long dead New Year's resolutions, like saber fencing, playing the ukulele, and Japanese brush painting.

I prefer all of my skeletons out of the closet, to make more room for my shoes.

We all have skeletons in our closets. Some of us are just better at hiding them behind the hangers filled with clothes." "Yeah, right, you don't seem like the type of guy who has a pile of femur bones stuffed behind your collared shirts and navy blue blazers." Nick and Wilson

It is better to have ten skeletons in your closet, than walk with no bones.

The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets. — JOHN MARK GREEN

Here's a queer fact: none among the skeletons in your closet are ‘straight’ so expect them to ‘come out’ very, very soon...

Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend? How his letters, written in the period of love and confidence, sicken and rebuke you! What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead affection! What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love! What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got or written drawers full of them. They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun

The entire population of Blackfin maintained a wary distance from her, as though the skeletons in their closets were spring-loaded and ready to burst out onto the front lawn.

What am I supposed to see in this closet? More skeletons? Don't you humans have a saying about that?

I have known politicians with more skeletons in their closet than an undertaker's wife.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

Squatting' in a Smith machine is an oxymoron. A Smith machine is not a squat rack, no matter what the girls at the front desk tell you. A squat cannot be performed on a Smith machine any more than it can be performed in a small closet with a hamster. Sorry. There is a gigantic difference between a machine that makes the bar path vertical for you and a squat that is executed correctly enough to have a vertical bar path. The job of keeping the bar path vertical should be done by the muscles, skeleton, and nervous system, not by grease fittings, rails, and floor bolts.

people were like icebergs--most of what really went on, especially the ugliness, was submerged

God’s purpose is not to get us out of earth and into heaven; it’s to reconcile heaven and earth.

the skeletons in both our closets plotted hard to fuck this up

Show me your hidden skeletons and I will show you closets hidden by my monsters.

In a sense, God has a closet filled with infinite secrets about himself, but it contains only priceless treasures, no skeletons.

There’s nothing worse than seeing the craziness in a calm person as they ask for something completely ridiculous and then to have them look at you as if you’re a shovel shy of a tool shed.

I don't mind being introduced to people's skeletons firsthand, in person. I more than don't mind it. I prefer to reach right into the closet and shake their bony hands and say hello for myself.

[Adapted and condensed Valedictorian speech:] I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish. People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years. They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they're abandoned. If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone. The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present - it's a gift. They are free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. No inner demons. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn't forty years ago when you still had all you hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it's still going on, this very moment." I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. "And this moment, too." Another three seconds. "And this moment, too." Another. "And this moment, too.

In fact, I know that a 'nice live little boy' would be far better than - my skeleton in the closet; only - we aren't always willing to make the exchange. We are apt to still cling to - our skeletons, Pollyanna.

Logan licked a glob of strawberry jelly from her lower lip and smiled up at Odin. Only one comment seemed to perfectly fit her current situation. “I see dead people.” He leaned forward, hands on his hips. “Me, too. It’s the only explanation for what’s standing in front of me. Unless some high school kids broke into the anatomy closet and stole the classroom skeleton, stretched some cadaver skin over that bitch then cast an ancient ritual to animate it.

The thing about skeletons was, you never knew how much space they were taking up in the closet until you got rid of them.

She put her hands over her ears and made a monkey face. Even then, she couldn't look ugly. She had such good bones, her skeleton would have been an ornament in any closet.

If she opened the closet with her skeletons, they might drag her in with them.

Don't worry, the only skeletons in my closet belong to the mice.

As Solzhenitsyn famously observed, the line separating good and evil passes not between countries, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through the middle of every human heart.

We might be done with the past but the past isnt done with us. Ever think of that? Maybe the only way to move forward isnt to shove all our skeletons into a closet and pretend they never existed. The closet is still there, Nico, and the next time you open it, all that shit is going to fall in top of you. - Raven Black

The Nazis take the skeleton in the closet of centuries and rattle it boastfully. Force, they declare, will always be necessary, since it is in the nature of human life (which is true, if one accepts their concept of human life).

We should be willing to enjoy a full picture of our heroes, leaders, and history. I believe that when we ignore the "darker side" we leave ourselves unprepared for the revelation of some unhappy deed or event of past or present. We might be better off if we leave the warts on and let a few of the skeletons out of the closets ourselves for open examination. On the other hand, there are dangers in debunking everyone and everything that is a little above the ordinary. We ought to seek a happy balance of letting the truth flow forth without either hiding or digging for problems.

Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.

To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two or three. To know always, whether you were in Little Rock or Menton, that there was one place to which you belonged and to which you would return. To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place, from the newest baby-squall on the street to the blunt cuneiform of the burial ground . . . Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations. Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there? The whole race was like the fir tree in the fairy-tale which wanted to be cut sown and dressed up with lights and bangles and colored paper, and see the world and be a Christmas tree. Well, he said, thinking of the closed banks, the crashed market that had ruined thousands and cut his father’s savings in half, the breadlines in the cities, the political jawing and the passing of the buck. Well, we’ve been a Christmas tree, and now we’re in the back yard and how do we like it?

All schools have their skeletons. St Oswald’s is no exception. Most of the time, we try our best to keep them in the closet. But this time, the only recourse we have is to throw open all the closets, light as many bulbs as we can and catch the vermin as it comes out.

Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity was my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was. Was this the skeleton in civilization’s closet? The reason why men had come down so hard on us since the start of time?

Only one comment seemed to perfectly fit her current situation. “I see dead people.” He leaned forward hands on his hips. “Me too. It’s the only explanation for what’s standing in front of me. Unless some high school kids broke into the anatomy closet and stole the classroom skeleton, stretched some cadaver skin over that bitch then cast an ancient ritual to animate it.” She laughed. For as much as she now disliked the bastard she had to admit he was amusing. “Did they do the same to that shit you’re wearing? You do realize it’s 2008 right?” She raised a hand. “Wait let me see if I can reach you using your own language. You do ken ‘tis year of our Lord two thousand and eight aye?

It is more important to move on to positive actions without stopping to wallow in anger about injustices -- including the unjust suppression of inventors. Exposing the skeletons in the closet serves to enlighten, but getting off-message with retribution will be counter-productive.

Do we get a second chance? The question often arises: “Can I reject God now but change my mind on the threshold of his kingdom?” To ask the question this way, however, is misleading: it reveals that we probably don’t actually want the kingdom. If we prefer freedom from God now, what makes us think we’ll change our mind when his kingdom comes? If we harden our hearts toward his presence today, why would we expect tomorrow to be different?

Dogs are better than people. This is a complete and true verified fact. Dogs don’t care what you look like. Dogs don’t care what skeletons hide in your closet. They don’t care what color you are, or what weight, or how rich, or how guilty. They don’t care about your gender or your sexual orientation. They don’t care if you have deformities or illnesses. They care about being fed and played with and petted. They’ll lick your face because it’s your face. “I love dogs,

have you heard the sex party rumor?” She winced and said, “It actually does sound familiar.” I had the impulse to shake my head, but I didn’t want to mess up Veronica’s handiwork. I said, “You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with these kinds of skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.” 2004

Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think of us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means, parentage, or object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon in isolation. It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most; and the possession by a hundred acquaintances, severally insulated, of the knowledge of our skeleton-closet’s whereabouts, is not so distressing to the nerves as a chat over it by a party of half-a-dozen — exclusive depositaries though these may be.

He’s pale, bald, and bony. He looks like a skeleton. And that, my friend, is precisely why I keep him in my closet.

The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle.

My skeletons are not in the closet; they’re on the front lawn.

You don't have to face every skeleton in your closet before you can make some room in there!

I do not have skeletons in my closet, only graves.

Man, talk about having a skeleton in the closet—this

Sometimes it's hard for me to understand that people can believe in me, that they can trust that I'll be anything more than the sum of the skeletons in my closet. But I can be. And I am.

God’s will is not currently done on earth as in heaven, implying a distance in heaven and earth’s relationship. The earth exists in a state of exile and alienation from its intended home with God.

To ask God to redeem Jerusalem but not cast sin outside the city walls is like asking a doctor to heal your body without excising the disease. Like asking the light to arise without casting out the darkness. Like asking for restoration to come and destruction to remain. It is to ask for a contradiction. God excludes sin from his kingdom because of his goodness, not in opposition to or in spite of it.

Good behavior is often a means of keeping God at bay. Obedience and obligation can erect as much a barrier to life with God as lawless rebellion and wanton destruction. Duty and debauchery have more in common than we might expect. Selfishness and self-righteousness just might be twins separated at birth. Both good and evil hang from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; the problem is that they are on the wrong tree.

Today I share about my addiction and recovery journey as often as possible because I don't want to die all alone in a dark closet, shrouded in shame beside the decomposing skeletons I tried so desperately to hide. I want to live.

What sin does, in essence, is pull our gaze from God and others and turns it in upon ourselves, so that we become “curved inward,” valuing ourselves over and against God, first and foremost, and the others God has given us to love.

His teeth began to chatter. God All-Mighty! he thought, why haven't I realized it all these years? All these years I've gone around with a--SKELETON--inside me! How is it we take ourselves for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being? A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!

A period which suffers from a so-called high general level of liberal education but which is devoid of culture in the sense of a unity of style which characterizes all its life, will not quite know what to do with philosophy and wouldn’t, if the Genius of Truth himself were to proclaim it in the streets and the market places. During such times philosophy remains the learned monologue of the lonely stroller, the accidental loot of the individual, the secret skeleton in the closet, or the harmless chatter between senile academics and children

Pol Pot (the architect of the Cambodian genocide) and my sweet grandmother (who wouldn’t hurt a fly) stand together before the Great Physician, and his question is not, “Which one of you was better?” but rather, “Will you let me heal you?” In leveling the playing field, Jesus makes way for grace.

When you give me art—give me something that reaches inside of my core and twists, taking the very breath that sustains me away. Give me something that wakens me from my lethargy. Give me something that causes me to ponder and question all that I have come to know; due to my circumstances that I have been allotted in this life. Give me something that causes me to question my pride and arrogance of knowing that I am right in my thoughts, beliefs and perceptions. Shake me: as if you had grabbed me and pushed me against the wall—shattering all of my preconceived notions; causing me to break out of the box that I have put others in. Give me something that scraped over the scar tissue of wounds that you carry within, opening them afresh and causing you pain—real core pain—pain that you had pushed down; pain that now resides in your closet of skeletons. When you give me art, give me you, or give me nothing at all… ©2014 Suzanne Steele

This confronts our popular cartoons, where little red devils poke you with pitchforks and laugh at you on into eternity. Jesus tells us this is not a place where Satan reigns; it is a place where he meets his destruction. Where his agenda is contained. Where sin’s wildfire is bound with the arsonist who first lit the match.

Spring Cleaning All morning I have been pulling skeletons out of the closet the old bones that keep me awake at night the old faces I see in my dreams. But in the closet there are only old letters old clothes that don’t fit boxes of souvenirs postcards of favorite places Dust stirs in the corners like a secret heart trying to beat again. Wreckage from an old war I sit like a widow sifting through it touching the skeletons for the last time. It is spring and time to let go of them let the closet billow with fresh air. And if it’s true that the past is always with us then let it be invisible as an angel. But first I must bury these old bones.

Every town has its secrets.” He began. “San Felipe is no different. Skeletons are hidden in closets for a reason my friend. And trust me when I tell you, San Felipe has many skeletons. The moral of the story is; don’t go snooping into strange closets. You will only find sins and betrayal. Why do you think we drink tequila so much?

Hell begins to look like a place God creates alongside heaven for the primary purpose of torturing sinners for eternity. But this is the wrong story. In the gospel story, heaven and earth are currently torn by sin. Our world is being ravaged by the destructive power of hell. Sin has unleashed it into God’s good world, and God is on a mission to get it out, to reconcile heaven and earth from hell’s evil influence to himself through the reconciling life of Christ. The time is coming when God’s heavenly kingdom will come down to reign on earth forever, when Jesus will cast out the corrosive powers of sin, death, and hell that have tormented his world for so long.

Suddenly, I had a problem. Jesus wants to get rid of sex trafficking too, only he takes it a lot more seriously than I do. I want to get rid of sex trafficking; Jesus wants to get rid of lust. I want to prune back the wicked tree; he wants to dig out the root. And that wicked root is in me. I may not be a sex trafficker, a pedophile tourist, or a greedy madam—but I have lust. I can be one lusty animal. Jesus says if you even look lustfully at one of God’s daughters, demeaningly commodifying her as an object for your own self-centered gratification, then the power of hell has its roots in you, and when God arrives to establish his kingdom, you are in danger of being cast outside the kingdom with it.

Evil is a parasite that wants to tear creation apart from the inside out. In the same way that a healthy body does not require cancer to exist, God’s creation does not require evil to exist. But the inverse is not true. Cancer does require a living, breathing body to sustain its existence, and evil similarly requires God’s good creation to sustain its own existence.

If your roots are in Jesus, your fruit will be love. Fruit takes time to grow; it doesn’t appear overnight. We don’t have to beat ourselves up for not being perfect Jesus-followers the day after we’ve started walking in his dust. It took the disciples a long time too. But the longer we’re planted in God’s garden, the deeper our roots grow in his goodness, and the more generosity, joy, and selflessness begin to spring forth from our branches.

Where I live, being considered “good” has little to nothing to do with institutional religion. The social benchmarks for moral applause have more to do with whether one eats organic, rides his or her bike to work, and supports a humanitarian initiative in Africa. Things like these—even if good things that contribute to the flourishing of our world, in a manner similar to many traditional religious works—comprise our contemporary bars of righteousness by which one’s social capital is improved. In corporate culture, these bars may have more to do with how much money we’ve made or the size of our portfolio. In political culture, how much power we’ve attained or the heights up the ladder we’ve climbed. In popular culture, how much sex we’ve had or the number of Twitter followers who are interested in what we have to say. The cultural decline of institutional religion has simply meant the relocation, not the destruction, of social norms through which we pursue personal justification and social acceptance for our existence.

In fact, some might argue that starting C-PTSD treatment by diving into the back of your closet and chasing out your scariest, most deeply buried skeleton is a terrible idea. You could find a murderous clown in the storm drain of your life, and he could start haunting your everyday existence. You could dig up something that triggers you badly and makes your symptoms worse or is so unpleasant to look at that you just quit therapy and never come back. That’s why many trauma therapists try to set up a strong framework of coping mechanisms before people launch into their foundational traumas.

Maybe! That’s the moral of many, many stories. Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything, as the shared society and negotiated order of the household reveals itself as inadequate, or disintegrates, in the face of the unexpected and threatening. Everybody whistles in the dark, instead. Communication would require admission of terrible emotions: resentment, terror, loneliness, despair, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. Moment by moment, it’s easier to keep the peace. But in the background, in Billy Bixbee’s house, and in all that are like it, the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. It lifts the very household from its foundations. Then it’s an affair, or a decades-long custody dispute of ruinous economic and psychological proportions. Then it’s the concentrated version of the acrimony that could have been spread out, tolerably, issue by issue, over the years of the pseudo-paradise of the marriage. Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything. There’s no ark, because no one built one, even though everyone felt the storm gathering.

Suddenly a force greater than my common sense—which, I’ll admit, has been pretty faulty lately, propels me—and I find myself creeping up the long staircase to the forbidden second floor. I need to see Michael’s room. I need to find out if he is a secret slob, or if there’s even more interesting evidence of whom he is up there. I’m not expecting to find anything big, like a literal skeleton in his closet. But I am going to find it, whatever it is. And I will know once and for all who he is. I make it to the landing when I hear a burst of barking below me and I freeze. Someone has let a dog in. Which means that some member of the Endicott family is actually in the house. Which means that one of Michael’s parents is about to catch me snooping.

God is not the author of evil; we are. G. K. Chesterton was invited by a London paper in the early 1900s to submit an essay in response to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” He humorously, and wisely, responded with a simple four-word essay: “Dear sirs, I am.”10 One of the problems with the ways we tend to talk about the power of hell is that we shift the blame for the cruelty that is ours in the world away from ourselves and toward the heart of the God who is good. Our problem is not that we are good and God is evil. The gospel flips this illusion on its head: God is good and we are evil. Our healing begins with our repentant acknowledgment of this fact; then we can fall into the arms of mercy that are waiting to receive us. But what if we will not repentantly acknowledge this truth? What if we will not fall into mercy? What if we will not receive and be healed?

Jesus contrasts who blesses and curses. The sheep are blessed “by my Father.” We might assume, then, that the goats are inversely cursed by the Father; but no such thing is said. Jesus simply says they are cursed. Like the rich man clutching his greed in the rubble of his riches while heaven calls him “son.” Like the wedding crasher refusing wedding clothes while the King calls him “friend.” Like the older brother weeping and gnashing his teeth in the backyard while the Father invites him inside to join the prodigal’s party. God blesses; we curse. The Father is good; we want to be left alone. The Light shines brightly; we prefer darkness. Ultimately, we are judged not for our failure to successfully wrap our hands around God’s arm, but rather for our stubborn refusal to be grasped by him, our incessant prying of his fingers from our recalcitrant hearts. God redeems his world; our destructive power is cast outside. God’s kingdom is established; the wildfire is banished. God brings an end to the bondage of creation.

His teeth began to chatter. God All-Mighty! he thought, why haven't I realized it all these years? All these years I've gone around with a--SKELETON--inside me! How is it we take ourselves for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being? A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice! He stood upright, because he could not bear to remain seated. Inside me now, he grasped his stomach, his head, inside my head is a--skull. One of those curved carapaces which holds my brain like an electrical jelly, one of those cracked shells with the holes in front like two holes shot through it by a double-barreled shotgun! With its grottoes and caverns of bone, its revetments and placements for my flesh, my smelling, my seeing, my hearing, my thinking! A skull, encompassing my brain, allowing it exit through its brittle windows to see the outside world!

I have come to believe that our culture’s popular understanding of these difficult doctrines is often a caricature of what the Bible actually teaches and what mature Christian theology has historically proclaimed. To Laugh At, To Live By What do I mean by a caricature? A caricature is a cartoonlike drawing of a real person, place, or thing. You’ve probably seen them at street fairs, drawings of popular figures like President Obama, Marilyn Monroe, or your aunt Cindy. Caricatures exaggerate some features, distort some features, and oversimplify some features. The result is a humorous cartoon. In one sense, a caricature bears a striking resemblance to the real thing. That picture really does look like President Obama, Marilyn Monroe, or your aunt Cindy. Features unique to the real person are included and even emphasized, so you can tell it’s a cartoon of that person and not someone else. But in another sense, the caricature looks nothing like the real thing. Salient features have been distorted, oversimplified, or blown way out of proportion. President Obama’s ears are way too big. Aunt Cindy’s grin is way too wide. And Marilyn Monroe . . . well, you get the picture. A caricature would never pass for a photograph. If you were to take your driver’s license, remove the photo, and replace it with a caricature, the police officer pulling you over would either laugh . . . or arrest you. Placed next to a photograph, a caricature looks like a humorous, or even hideous, distortion of the real thing. Similarly, our popular caricatures of these tough doctrines do include features of the original. One doesn’t have to look too far in the biblical story to find that hell has flames, holy war has fighting, and judgment brings us face-to-face with God. But in the caricatures, these features are severely exaggerated, distorted, and oversimplified, resulting in a not-so-humorous cartoon that looks nothing like the original. All we have to do is start asking questions: Where do the flames come from, and what are they doing? Who is doing the fighting, and how are they winning? Why does God judge the world, and what basis does he use for judgment? Questions like these help us quickly realize that our popular caricatures of tough biblical doctrines are like cartoons: good for us to laugh at, but not to live by. But the caricature does help us with something important: it draws our attention to parts of God’s story where our understanding is off. If the caricature makes God look like a sadistic torturer, a coldhearted judge, or a greedy génocidaire, it probably means there are details we need to take a closer look at. The caricatures can alert us to parts of the picture where our vision is distorted.