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January 4 - January 23, 2024
The problem is not so much the thoughts and the feelings created by his disease, but how he tries to manage them, what he does with them. He learns to offer up these thoughts and feelings to Christ and to depend on His Mercy—rather than himself—to be enough to sustain and lead him.
It has been important for me over the years to not understand a mental illness as a character flaw or a lack of faith when it is simply an Affliction, a kind of Suffering among other kinds of Suffering.
The only difference now is that those symptoms are a Wilderness I walk through rather than a god I worship.
And I have spent the last three years learning that it is only the thoughts and feelings we trust that get to kill us, that the saddest thing in the world isn’t to have bad thoughts or feelings. The saddest thing in the world is to believe things that are not true.
I don’t need to have the right thoughts and the right feelings to be okay. That is what I understand now.
I can understand I’m okay when I don’t feel okay. And with that understanding I can walk through the Wilderness of those bewildering symptoms and have myself a little life.
Mercy, I’ve learned, is not a feeling that must be felt, or thought that we must think, but a Reality that is understood.
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.
The heart is not a thought or feeling but our capacity to trust, to hand ourselves over to what is trusted. We cannot see or even really feel this “heart.” But it is the heart that consecrates everything we can see and feel.
Christ is the Mercy that has been offered, that I am servant and guest of the Mercy that has been offered, that I am headed into the future provided by the Mercy that has been offered, and that, until it arrives, the only thing I can really do is behold, be patient, and bear witness to the Mercy that has been offered.
Understanding who Christ is, who you are, and where you’re going and what you’re supposed to be doing does not make you suffer less, it only changes what Suffering appears to you as: as simple Wilderness rather than god. As symptoms rather than omens.
And this helps you to bear it all quietly. You can have that patient, quiet understanding and still be upset. You can have that patient, quiet understanding and still be miserable. You can have that understanding and still be tempted by despair. You can have that understanding and still be in anguish and distress. This patient, quiet understanding can even be deepened in anguish and distress. It can be deepened in torment and misery. You can have that understanding and still have these Afflictions.
The Realm is a vast country, and this patient, quiet understanding is only a place to stand, naked, terrified, seemingly alone.
That foothold, that boat, that kernel, is not a place where I do something to be okay. It is a place where I don’t. That patient, quiet understanding is the place where I stand with Christ and don’t do anything to make things right or win or be okay. It is the place where I don’t fix, the place where I don’t defend myself, the place where I don’t figure things out, and the place where I don’t know for sure. The place where it is somehow possible to not engage those compulsions.
The mystery of faith is what I mean by patient, quiet understanding: the fear of the Lord, that quiet trust, that quiet reverence, that simple humility.
The understanding that Mercy has been offered, that I don’t need to do anything to be okay, that something has been done so that I am okay.
A Word that is His beauty, His company, and His feast so that to hear it is to be seen, to be safe, and to be fed. To hear it is to become someone else.
The hardness of heart is a blindness we can’t even see to get rid of, a dependence on ourselves that we cannot even distinguish from ourselves. And because this pride isn’t something we can see to get rid of, and because this hardness of heart isn’t something we can even distinguish from ourselves, it is not something we can ever end. We cannot end our own hardness of heart. We cannot end our unwillingness and unbelief. And so in order to bury something so close to us, something we can’t even see, something we think we think is the same as ourselves, this Word must be nearer to us than we are
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There is nothing in my life that has been more painful than the overturning of my hardness of heart. There is nothing in the Christian life that will make us come so close to feeling that we are being destroyed.
When Mercy strikes, when Mercy burns, we think we are being destroyed, we think we are being humiliated and crushed, when what is happening is that we are being seen, we are becoming safe, we are being fed, we are being changed by Christ’s death and resurrection. We are finally beginning to understand.
It is not within the overt power of trauma, crashes, AIDs, or dementia, or within OCD itself, to be a friend to me, but only within the subversive power of the gospel to do so, to make them an unwilling friend of my life in Christ.
will be most changed by what I worship. To worship is to be changed by what you depend on.
Christ’s promise is that we will not be most changed by the horrors in the Wilderness but by the Mercy we have waited on.
Suffering, by itself, does not have any meaning. It only ruins, it only takes away. It is only given meaning by Christ’s proximity to it. And He only gives meaning to it by enduring, bearing, and overcoming it.
in this Wilderness, anything we trust Christ with—anything we give to him—will transform us, that is, turn us into simple servants and guests of the Mercy offered in His gospel.
Because that is our only way out. The only way out is to be forgiven. Why? Because only in the forgiveness of sin is there a tenderness and severity that can separate shame, fear, and humiliation from the way we’ve controlled it. Because the forgiveness of sin is the only thing that can possibly untangle our own pain from the hidden and idolatrous ways we’ve managed it. Our soul’s anguish from our heart’s pride: a distinction that simply isn’t available to us.
The Worst Has Happened. Everything is wrong. But it is too late. Christ has given Himself to us. And now that Christ has given Himself to us, we have been given back to God, to ourselves, and to each other.
“The Word has been spoken. The only thing left is to say amen.” There is nothing in this life more beautiful and harrowing than the understanding of who Christ is.
This tension between the Word we are led from and the Amen we are led to is the tension of trying to live.
Christ is the rescue, the leading, the fulfillment of the trust we have in Him.
These three things, hearing, prayer, and offering, are not desires, emotions, passions, skills, talents, or abilities. They are our dependence on Christ. They are simply what we’re headed toward. The few things we are being led to by His Spirit.
The most important thing in the Wilderness is not to feel better or worse, but to know someone and be headed somewhere.
The way of the cross is not a skill, an ability, or even a desire. It is the direction of the heart, confirmed by His Spirit. It is an orientation. It is where we’re headed, and the willingness to be led there. The only intention given to us by His Spirit is to return to What’s Been Given and to be led to What’s Been Promised. Through hearing, in prayer, and by offering.
With that understanding and those intentions, I have been given a deep and unshakable reverence for Christ that has made it possible to withstand myself and pay attention to others, and to craft a life at various turns beautiful, strange, small, hard, and—even in its anguish—charged with extraordinary means.
My dependence on Christ was the only thing that couldn’t be taken from me.
The trust that grasps Christ—even and especially if it is patient and quiet—is a splendid, wounded, trembling, crying thing. We can have this patient, quiet trust and still be upset. We can have it and still be miserable. We can have it and still be in great uncertainty and tension.
The only answer to the intolerable, the unacceptable, the inconsolable is this mystery of faith, a rescue, a leading, and a fulfillment by which even the traumatized and severely mentally ill can still know someone and be quietly changed by heading somewhere.
Looking intently at a severely mentally ill friend of mine over a cup of coffee, I said quietly to Jesus, “Lord, can he grow, if all he has is trust?” “Your faith has made you well.” Anyone who can trust can be transfigured.
Mercy had changed what the world appeared to me as. The world had been changed by what I understood. No longer a world to be grabbed at or controlled but a world to be listened to, to be prayed for, and above all to be served as Christ served it—that is, by gentleness and by blood, by struggle and sweat and tenderness. It was not to be fixed, managed, controlled. It was to be patiently, quietly transfigured by attention and regard. A world to be transfigured by offering. A world we have been asked to serve so Christ might be revealed. A world we have been asked to offer ourselves to, our
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I was more limited and vulnerable than I thought. It was always a harrowing and painful revelation of who I was: that there was so little I could do. I could only serve. I could not guarantee What Should Happen or ever know What Could Happen. And I began to have less and less of an idea of What Should Happen and What Could Happen, but a deeper, more beautiful, and harrowing sense of what I was supposed to offer. Until I got small enough to finally offer what I could.
I see now what I did not see then. There in a gown, walking gently on shoeless feet, and mumbling under the fluorescent lights of the local psych ward, was the life I had made out of thinking more, and thinking better. This was my life in the Realm of Ceaseless Cognition. This is what you become when you only live there. I would have to face it, sooner or later. My best thinking was how I got here. I got here by consoling myself. I got here by trying to be okay.
It was the quiet where I could depend on Christ, the silence after Mercy had been spoken. Because we are not, thank God, what we can think, or what we will do. We are not our thoughts and not even our wills. We are what the Word of God will make of us. I had just found the Christ I could depend on. I had just picked up the Thread of an ordinary life with Christ. And suddenly there was something else. And it was not a word, and it was not a voice. It was an understanding in my heart that I should go to bed. And could go to bed. That I could depend on Christ by going to bed. And I did.
“Try not to worry so much.
“Try to develop a sense of humor.”
wish I could say I got better because I was resilient and smart. But I got better because they let me keep my Bible and an old woman walked down the hallway with me, asking me very lovely, very simple questions.
This is a world of great shame and fear and pride. And those are forces too powerful to be overcome by us. There are some things that cannot be defeated by effort, but only by trust. Because they have been overcome by Christ.
I hadn’t considered, and still have a hard time understanding, that my trust is much more precious to him than my sanity, that it honored him more than the feelings
We cannot ask our thoughts or feelings to confirm or validate those things that can only be known by a wounded and crying trust. It is a simple, quiet trust, born of hearing, that leads our life in Christ. It is the rest that clumsily, awkwardly follows.
There is a reason people lie. Honesty is a crisis. Vulnerability is a kind of disaster. You really do lose everything when you do the right thing. And you really don’t get everything back at the end.
