The Box in the Alley

There’s an image that keeps coming back to me, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember. A cardboard box in a dirty forgotten dark alley, tucked off to the side where no one walks. The box is unremarkable– the kind people walk past without registering it’s there. No one sees me slip inside. No one notices when I come out. I blend into the dark, invisible to everyone except the One who already knows where to find me.

Inside we just talk. All day, every day. No agenda, no mission, no preparation for returning to anything. Just conversation and presence and the kind of quiet that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Room enough for just me and God….. that’s it. Just me and God in this box, forever, and forget the world. It isn’t a wonder this has been a repeating fantasy of mine… it feels like heaven to me.

It’s not a response to difficulties or to any specific crisis. It’s older than all of that. I’ve wanted this box since before I had language for why I wanted it, before I had theological categories to make sense of it.

Modern Christianity doesn’t know what to do with that either.

We’ve generally domesticated withdrawal into productivity strategy. Rest so you can work harder. Retreat so you can return more effective. Solitude as fuel for service. Even contemplative practice gets marketed as a tool for better leadership, clearer decision-making, more sustainable ministry.

The idea that someone might choose hiddenness not as means to an end but as the end itself… that someone might want to be with God more than they want to do anything for God– makes us deeply uncomfortable. It feels selfish. Unproductive. A waste of gifts and calling and potential impact.

Its possible this discomfort should be recognized as evidence of exactly the disease they were trying to escape. The compulsion to be useful, to justify existence through productivity, to measure spiritual maturity by visible fruit rather than interior transformation.

But here’s what I still can’t resolve.

I don’t know if my desire for the box is spiritual longing or just misanthropy with theological vocabulary.

Maybe I want the box because being around people is exhausting and disappointing and I’m tired of the constant work of managing relationships that seem to require more than they return. Maybe the appeal isn’t actually God’s presence but the absence of everyone else’s demands.

Perhaps this can be called misanthropy, as it can be one of the primary temptations of the solitary life. The danger that what begins as seeking God devolves into contempt for humanity, that withdrawal motivated by love of God gets corrupted into withdrawal motivated by hatred of people. I can’t honestly say that’s not what this completely is. I can’t confidently claim that wanting the box represents pure spiritual desire rather than sophisticated avoidance dressed up in contemplative language.

But then I wonder if loving God and being exhausted by people are mutually exclusive. As if the desire for God’s presence and the desire to escape human demands can’t coexist, can’t both be true at the same time.

What the box actually offers

The reality is that the box offers something I haven’t found anywhere else: the possibility of being known without being used.

Every other form of being seen has been transactional. People see me as useful…..someone who can organize events, lead groups, provide theological insight, manage complexity. Or they see me as a problem…. someone who needs to be managed, controlled, whose autonomy threatens their interests.

Even relationships that started as genuine connection eventually became about what I could provide or what role I could fill. The seeing was always tied to an agenda, always provisional, always contingent on continued performance or usefulness.

In the box, there’s no agenda. God doesn’t need me to be useful. He doesn’t need me to lead anything or fix anything or produce anything. He’s not building a case against me or surveilling my choices to use them as evidence later. He’s not disappointed when I fail to meet expectations because He’s not holding me to any standard except existence.

The Hebrew concept of yada, “to know”, appears throughout the Old Testament not as intellectual apprehension but as intimate, experiential knowledge. When God knows someone, it’s the knowledge that comes from sustained attention, from seeing completely without the distortion of personal agenda.

This is what the box offers. To be known, yada, by the only One whose knowing has never been weaponized against me, whose seeing has never been contingent on my performance.

But here’s the theological problem.

God’s knowing is supposed to lead somewhere. It’s supposed to produce mission, calling, participation in redemptive work.

• When God knows Moses, it leads to leading Israel out of Egypt.
• When God knows Isaiah, it leads to prophetic ministry.
• When God knows Paul, it leads to planting churches across the Roman Empire.

The knowing is never terminal. It’s always instrumental, always pointing toward something beyond the relationship itself.

What if I don’t want the something beyond? What if I just want the knowing, the being seen, without it having to produce anything or lead anywhere or justify itself through fruit?

The lifelong nature of this desire

This is what troubles me most: the box isn’t a response to anything. It’s not trauma recovery or burnout management or a temporary need for withdrawal after crisis. It’s been there my whole life, this desire to disappear with God into a space where nothing else exists. Before the birth of my son, before all my past relationships, and before any of the specific circumstances that would make wanting to hide understandable.

The desire predates its apparent justification.

What does that mean?

One possibility: it’s a form of spiritual pathology, something malformed in my relationship to the world that makes community feel intolerable and isolation feel like peace. A wound masquerading as calling.

Another possibility: it’s a legitimate spiritual vocation that I’ve spent my whole life trying to suppress because it doesn’t fit acceptable categories of Christian life. The call to hiddenness that keeps getting drowned out by expectations about engagement and service and visible fruit.

I don’t know which it is.

Wisdom would say that discernment requires testing, that you discover the authenticity of solitary calling by actually living it and examining what it produces. Does it lead to greater love for God and humanity? Or does it lead to pride, contempt, spiritual narcissism?

But testing requires actually choosing the box. Actually withdrawing. Actually letting go of the obligations and expectations and roles that keep me tethered to visibility.

And I’m afraid of what I’ll find there.

Afraid that the box won’t be what I imagine, that even in hiddenness I’ll still hear the voices that narrate my failures, still feel the weight of expectations I’ve internalized so thoroughly they no longer need external enforcement.

Afraid that God will meet me there and then tell me I have to leave, that the whole point of wilderness is preparation for return, and I don’t want to return.

Afraid that I’ll discover the box is exactly what I hoped and then have to choose between staying there and fulfilling every obligation I’m supposed to care about.

What someone said.

Someone suggested the box might already exist. Not as physical space but as interior territory: the early morning tea before anyone is awake, the anonymous writing that no one reads, prayer that can’t be documented or surveilled.

Wherever I can exist without audience.

This reframes the question. Maybe choosing the box isn’t about geographical withdrawal but about creating and protecting interior space that remains hidden even while I continue to inhabit visible life. Maybe it’s possible to live in the alley while still showing up to work, still parenting, still existing in the world.

But I’m not sure this is sufficient. The interior box while maintaining external obligations still requires managing the external, still requires showing up and performing and being useful. It protects some space but not all of it, creates hiddenness but not complete obscurity.

The fantasy isn’t partial withdrawal. It’s complete disappearance.

What I still don’t know

I don’t know if wanting the box is spiritual maturity or spiritual failure. I don’t know if it’s wisdom or avoidance, calling or pathology, legitimate desire for God or sophisticated misanthropy.

I don’t know what happens if I actually choose it. Whether I’d find what I’m looking for or just discover new ways to be disappointed with myself and with God.

I don’t know if permanent withdrawal is even possible in my actual life, given the obligations and responsibilities that don’t dissolve just because I want them to.

What I do know is this: I’m tired of being visible. Tired of being needed, tired of performing, tired of the constant work of existing in ways other people find acceptable or useful or spiritually impressive.

The box offers none of that.

Just me and God in a dirty alley where no one walks, where no one notices, where I can finally stop trying to be anything other than what I am. I don’t know if that’s good. I don’t know if it’s what God wants for me or from me. I don’t know if it’s escape or encounter, wisdom or waste.

But it’s what I want.