The sound is the first thing.
A deadbolt. Heavy. Final. The kind of sound that tells a child something no one should have to learn at six years old: you are not getting out.
Then the dark.
Not regular dark. Not nighttime dark. A dark so complete it has texture. It presses on your eyes. It fills your mouth. It smells like dust and old coats and something sour — fear. My fear. I am six years old, and I know the sound of my own blood in my ears.
My hands are out in front of me. Little starfish in the black. They find wood. Splintered. Rough. I trace the outline of the door. The cracks where the light is not.
There is no light.
I slide down the door. My knees hit the floor. The grit digs into my skin. I curl my hands into fists. I am a small thing in a big dark.
A forgotten thing.
There is nothing like being six or seven and locked in complete darkness. Sometimes for hours. You do not know if it has been ten minutes or forever. You just know the black. And the quiet. And the cold.
And the lesson your body is learning before your mind can name it:
You are alone. No one is coming.
You will survive this by yourself, or you will not.
Eventually the door would open. The light would stab my eyes. A hand would pull me out. And I would go back to playing with the other kids, blinking, silent.
I never told anyone.
Not my parents. Not my friends. Not my wife — not for years. I buried that boy in the dark. I left him there and I walked away. I built a life on top of him.
I became a man. A husband. A father. A writer.
I learned to perform.
I became the Jester.
The Mask
The jester is the man who makes everyone laugh.
He is the one with the quick wit and the firm handshake. The one who holds the room. The one who shakes your hand at church on Sunday, a big smile on his face, and asks how you are, brother, and means it.
But the hands he is shaking with are the same hands that gripped the cold floor of that closet.
The smile is the one he learned to wear so no one would see the boy in the dark.
The performance is the hiding place. The laughter is the lock on a door no one else can see.
Robin Williams knew. The saddest people try the hardest to make people happy. They know what it is like to feel absolutely nothing.
Philip Seymour Hoffman knew. One of the greatest actors of his generation, found with a needle in his arm on a bathroom floor.
The performance ends. The darkness finds you.
The jester gets to tell the truth, you see. The king lets him speak because he is a fool. He can bleed out on stage and get a round of applause. He can say the hard thing with a laugh, and everyone can pretend it is a joke.
I have been the jester for thirty years.
The Song
It was a song that unlocked the door.
Not the first door — the closet at the daycare. The second one. The closet I built myself.
The closet of silence.
Johnny Cash. Singing a song by a man half his age.
Hurt.
I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that's real.
Cash recorded it months before he died. He changed the lyric from "crown of shit" to "crown of thorns." He made a song about heroin into a song about Christ.
Trent Reznor heard it and said the song was not his anymore.
I heard it a few weeks ago and the floor fell out of my life.
The flashback was not a gentle wave. It was a body slam. I was six again. On the floor. In the black. The hum was in my ears. The splinters were in my hands. The scream was in my throat.
And the pain was real.
It was the only thing that was.
That song became a key. It turned the lock on the second closet — the one I had built so carefully. The one where I kept the boy. The one where I never spoke of what happened.
And the question that had been a whisper in the back of my soul for decades became a roar.
Where Was God?
Where was He?
When a six-year-old boy was in the pitch black, convinced he was alone in all creation, where was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
Where was the Good Shepherd?
I was a lamb, and the wolves had me. The gate was shut.
I have preached about faith. I have written about the power of God. I have stood on stages and told people that He is good.
And all the while, this question was a cancer in my spirit. A dark, secret doubt at the core of my belief.
Because if He was not there for that little boy, what good is He?
I wrestled with it. I cursed Him. I begged Him.
Show me. Show me where you were.
And the other day, He did.
It was not a lightning bolt. It was not a voice from a burning bush. It was a quiet knowing. A terrible and beautiful certainty that settled in my bones.
He did not rescue me from the closet.
He was in the closet with me.
He was there in the dark. He was the silence next to my silence. He was the floor my hands were pressed against.
He knew what it was like to be in the dark, alone, waiting for the end. He had His own Gethsemane. His own cross. His own darkness over all the land.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. — Psalm 139:12
He was not a rescuer who arrived with a key. He was Emmanuel.
God with us.
Not God who stops the pain, but God who enters it.
He was there. He was there. He was there.
The Treasures of Darkness
To know this is not a relief.
It is a burden. It is a terrible knowledge. It means the pain was real, and He was in it, and He allowed it. It means He knows the geography of my personal hell because He was there to map it.
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I am the LORD. — Isaiah 45:3
The treasures of darkness. What a thing to say.
What are the treasures of a closet? What riches are hidden in a place where a child cannot see his own hands?
This: I was not alone.
That is the treasure. The terrible, sacred, costly treasure.
I was not alone.
Two Closets
The first closet had no light.
The second one had no voice.
The first closet was their prison. The second one was mine.
I have lived in the second closet for thirty years. It is a much larger closet. It has comfortable chairs. It has a family and a career and a reputation. It has the sound of laughter — mostly mine.
But it is still a closet. And the boy is still in it.
This article is me opening the second door.
Walking in the Light
The mask comes off. Right here. Right now.
This is the man behind the jester's smile. A man who is still afraid of the dark sometimes. A man who hears a song and is right back on that closet floor. A man who knows God was with him, and who still flinches when the lights go out.
Faith is not a cure. It is a companion.
It does not take the trauma away. It gives you someone to hold onto in the middle of it.
The revelation that He was there should make everything easier. It should make me want to run into the light and never look back.
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another. — 1 John 1:7
But sometimes, damn it, it is hard to walk in the light.
The light is exposing. The light shows the scars. The light means being seen. Truly seen.
And after a lifetime of performing, of hiding, being seen is the most terrifying thing in the world.
The darkness was a prison, but it was familiar. The performance was a lie, but it was safe.
To walk in the light is to walk naked.
It is to admit the empire is, and always was, just dirt.
I do not have a neat ending for you. No bow to tie on this.
The tension is the truth. The pain is real. God is real. Both are true.
The jester is tired of performing. The man is learning to walk, step by painful step, into the light.
And the God who sat with me in the first closet is, I have to believe, waiting for me outside the second.
The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. — Psalm 34:18
If you know a man who carries something like this — the kind of man who makes everyone laugh and then goes home and stares at the ceiling — send him this.
Not for my sake. For his.
It is a quiet signal in the dark. A hand reaching out.
Sometimes that is all a man needs.
Adam Johnson writes The Biblical Man for 26,000+ subscribers and Follow Me for the things he cannot say anywhere else. He is a former garbage man who believes a man's strength is found on the hard road, not the easy one.
