A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ

by John Andrew Bryant

What He was offering me, now, seemed strange. It wasn’t comfort, and it wasn’t answers, and it wasn’t relief from the terrible burden of those unwanted thoughts and feelings. But it was, I saw, a real offering.

Despite all of the pain, confusion, and dissatisfaction, I still knew when I looked at the cross, I was staring at His provision. Here, all that God could do was done. All that God could say was said. All that God could give was given. Here, in this place and in this way, God had been abundant with us. Here is where He would always be abundant. “Here, here, is what you need.” The gracious offer of Himself.

We are not most changed by what we think or feel or by what happened. We are most changed by what we depend on. And nothing has disfigured me more cruelly than my dependence on myself.

The Lord had not committed Himself to my plans. The Lord had committed Himself to me. Learning the difference was what was to make up the long arc of the Christian life.

“Don’t you trust me?”

Our first priority is not to defeat sin but to behold the Christ who has defeated sin.

And when Christ did come to me, and speak to me, and break His silence, it was not in fresh, ecstatic revelations but in plain words already spoken. Not with special things for me but with things he’d told all of us. His Word in the Scripture. The genius, the compassion of Christ is His patient willingness to approach us again—and to do new work in the heart—through what he’s already said and what he’s already done.

I had to get used to the fact that this was the victory: getting up. Christ’s death and resurrection wasn’t feeling better or feeling worse. It was understanding and intention. It was knowing someone and heading somewhere.

Because the gospel, especially when it is spoken out loud from the mouth of someone who isn’t us, continues to have a power over our hearts we do not have. The very strength of a Christian’s life, its very foundation, the very fact and basis of it, is its being announced by someone else. Hearing is the place where Christ finds us. The only trust we have is the one that has been rescued by hearing. The hearing of the Word is the rescue of the human heart.

We want so desperately to change so the world will turn its face toward us again. But the Lord operates differently. The Lord turns His face toward us that we

might be changed. We are changed as we are seen by Christ.

Humility and reverence is the condition of being pushed out of the center of your own life by the revelation of Who Christ Is. When Christ tells us who He is, He tells us who we are. It’s how you learn your smallness without hating yourself.

No one really wants to admit how small a life in Christ is. How it makes your life smaller so that it is bearable, how you’re given something so precious—His Word, His Spirit, and with it something so small and ordinary—hearing and prayer, with tattered Bibles and the half-hearted movements of our mouths at coffee shops and care home steps. That that quiet Rhythm is precisely how Christ wants to make a life with us. That isn’t just a dry routine. It is a rescue, a leading, a fulfillment of something. Of the trust we have in Christ. Trusting in Christ by hearing, trusting Christ with things through prayer. Learning to become quiet. Learning to become simple.

And I knew I had Christ not by thought or by feeling or by ability, but by understanding and intention. And Christ could create and rescue and lead our intentions. So that we could always head somewhere with Him.

We cannot see trust, but it consecrates everything we can see.

Holiness was ordinary things set aside for God by trust in Him, a holy life was an ordinary life with ordinary things that have been offered to Christ.

A cross. Driven into the ground two thousand years ago. What a small and pitiful and peculiar and desperate thing to hang a life on, and yet it had borne the weight of my whole life.

That there is something worse than the experience of shame and fear. And it is our addiction to handling it ourselves.

The reason so few of us grow in our life in Christ is because it is so painful. There is no growth to our dependence on Christ that is not also a wound to our dependence on self.

We think Christ is honored by what we think and feel. But Christ is honored by what we trust him with.

To learn that hope is not a feeling and not even the end of despair but the leading of the trust that had been rescued through hearing. What I take it to mean is that confusion and disorientation and pain and pilgrimage are part of the resurrection, not outside of it.

They were supposed to feel that peril, that sensation of drowning, that heaving grief and learn to wait. They were supposed to stand there and wait on Christ. And wait there with Christ. In the sinking boat. And this could be done in prayer. Prayer is how we wait on the Lord. Prayer is how I drowned and how I learned I would not drown. How I learned even shame, fear, and despair could be the deepening of my trust in Christ.

I learned that uncertainty, tension, conflict, doubt, complication, tedium, transition, agitation, frustration, confusion, anger, and temptation are not

intolerable and not even a sign that something is wrong but just a part of being human.

But meaning was what I didn’t have. And prayer was about giving myself time to not know what things meant. Prayer was the suspension of my heart and mind’s relentless pleading for narrative. Its perilous drive toward meaning. Meaning was something precious, something that would have to be gradually sorted out by hearing, through prayer, in offering. It would have to be sorted out gradually with Christ. Something gradually sorted out through Word and Spirit, hearing and prayer, patient understanding and diligent intention.

You have my life. And the only thing that matters is my life. But you do not have it by argument, by feeling, by effort, by circumstance. You can have all of it. And it’s the only real life there is. But you only have it by trust and frailty.”

My thoughts and feelings might never return to me as consolation again. I would have to make my life about something else. I would have to make my life about paying attention. To live simply and vulnerably with Christ, so that I might learn to pay attention.