As Told to Jessica Hanewinckel
I struggle a lot with anxiety. It’s something my family and I have had to work through extensively, and I’ve had to learn how to trust God through others in order to get out of bed each day. Sometimes you just have to force yourself to love your neighbor by getting out of bed and living, and at the end of the day, that’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s great to have medication or a therapist or a spiritual director who helps, but you still have to choose to live, and that’s the hard part.
It’s a strange time in the church. On one hand, there is much greater awareness and acceptance of mental health issues. But on the other hand, if you share that you’re suffering from depression or anxiety, people are sometimes going to give you easy answers. They aren’t going to be willing to walk with you through that suffering, but they will tell you what they think you need to do to get rid of it.
The easy-fix temptation is everywhere. But part of our faith is that we believe we will be healed; we just don’t know what that timeline looks like. That’s not an excuse to avoid trying to get better, because one of the dark things about mental health affliction is that sometimes we can fall in love with it. We can give in to it as a form of despair. So, on one hand, we want to acknowledge that some of these things aren’t going to go away soon, but on the other hand, we want to fight. You need to fight for your mental health, because that’s a way of loving your neighbor.
To follow Christ is to die to self. And when you’re suffering mentally, dying to self looks like choosing to live, which is ironic, but there it is. It’s choosing to embrace life and not to despair. That means going to work, caring for your family and friends, and getting the help you need. Doing that is a way of saying life is worth fighting for. This life is a gift from God that we get to participate in with joy, even when joy looks like bearing with suffering.
Even when you don’t feel it, your life is a beautiful witness. It has purpose and meaning, and when you take steps that testify to the goodness of your life, you’re communicating to other people that their lives are worth living too. Sometimes it’s difficult for us to see that our lives have value, but it’s easier to see in other people. If we really believe that the lives of our family and friends are meaningful, then we need to act as if our lives are meaningful too, because they are.
Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture and an advisor for the AND Campaign. His latest release is On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living (IVP).