For 75 years, May has been observed as Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s important to me to recognize that believing in God is no “get out of jail free” card for anyone struggling with mental health. And at some point in our lives, all of us will suffer to some degree.
Every single person you know is suffering pain you likely know nothing about. In honor of those I know who are struggling today, I want to recommend a couple of resources I am currently reading. And I want to offer you a discount on Letters to My Friends in Pain. I’ve had a couple of therapists recommend the book. Maybe you know a therapist you would like to gift the book to as a resource? In honor of all of us who are struggling, ‘Letters’ is on sale at $16.47 on Amazon.
Here are two books I’m reading that help us understand our common struggle with our hearts and minds.
1. Alan Noble’s “On Getting Out of Bed.” An excellent and honest resource for anyone who struggles with the burden of living.
Quote:
“The most fundamental decision is the decision to get out of bed. And it too communicates something. The decision to get out of bed is the decision to live. It is a claim that life is worth living despite the risk and uncertainty and the inevitability of suffering – one of the few things we can know for certain in this life.
Rising out of bed each day is also a decisive act. Living is a wager. It is a severe gamble. You do not know the suffering and sorrow that awaits. You do not know the heartache. But you know it is coming for you: to that, history and literature have testified without counterclaim. To choose to go on is to proclaim with your life, and at the risk of tremendous suffering, that it is good. Even when it is hard, it is good. Even when you don’t feel that it is good, even when that goodness is unimaginable, it is good.
When we act on that goodness by rising out of bed, when we take that step to the block in radical defiance of suffering and our own anxiety and depression and hopelessness, with our heads held high, we honor God and His creation, and we testify to our family, to our neighbors, and to our friends of His goodness. This act is worship.”
2. John Andrew Bryant’s “A Quiet Mind to Suffer With.” This is not a light, casual, or easy read, but it is a deep dive into one person’s journey to find life in Christ as he struggles with what is wrong with his mind.
Quote:
“And I count that patient, quiet understanding – that hard kernel of patient quiet trust – as more deeply bought and more vigilantly guarded than anything else in my life. It has been more precious to me than better thoughts, and better feelings. I make my way through the Wilderness of what can be thought and what can be felt as that patient, quiet understanding, a sojourner in the Wilderness of experiences created by my mind.
It has also, at times, felt like being a small, unsinkable boat in a great storm. A storm no one else can see because it is, as they say, all in your head.
That understanding, that small boat, that hard kernel of patient, quiet trust has a uniquely religious valence. It is the patient, quiet trust I have in Christ. It is the patient, quiet understanding of who Christ is. A capacity to quietly hand myself over to who I know Christ to be and to know I am okay.
This is not, of course, what I wanted. What I wanted was better thoughts and better feelings The absence of Suffering. I wanted my brain to provide better experiences. And what I got was a better understanding of who Christ is and who I am; where I’m headed and what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Another quote:
“Calling this illness What’s Wrong may sound like a harsh way of putting it. But calling it that has been a tenderness toward myself. When the Siren (his mental illness) is a god, then I’m afraid of it. When it is a Bully, I have to fight it. What when it’s What’s Wrong, then it’s just a vulnerability I take care of. I go from being mad at my brain to wanting to take care of it because it’s sick and because it’s mine. I go from fighting and hiding it to quietly, patiently leading it. I can offer myself to the brain that I have rather than hate my brain for not being what I wanted.”
In Letters to My Friends in Pain, I’ve done my best to acknowledge that our struggles and suffering should be an honest part of our conversations. I’d like to help normalize the idea that all people suffer – Christians included. To be human is to suffer. As a Christian, it’s not wrong to want to be free from suffering, but life is found, not in escaping my pain and not in denying that I suffer at all, but in embracing my broken, even brutal, life with Jesus. After all, He knows something about honoring God through suffering.