On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

by Alan Noble

I didn’t believe that I was owed this normal life. But my sense of the world and of Christianity was that if I put in the work and honored God with my time, none of these good things were out of reach. They were normal, reasonable expectations. It wasn’t like I had grandiose visions of fame or riches. I just expected things to be nice if I took care of my business. And so I did. As I grew older, my

You can walk around for a long time thinking nonsense like this—that most adults have it together and live safe, pleasant lives, and that the ones who don’t only have themselves to blame. It’s easy to think like Job’s friends.

There’s a kind of unspoken conspiracy to ignore how difficult life is, or to reframe it as something romantic—a heroic challenge we overcome on our way to the good life.

Whatever challenges we face can be solved. That’s society’s promise.

someone with a nearly debilitating mental disorder that only manifested after they were married and had kids and now their spouse seriously considers divorce on an almost monthly basis,

Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we see it everywhere: time-saving technology, apps that maximize our workouts, drugs that drown out our anxiety, ubiquitous entertainment in our pockets, and scientifically proven methods for parenting, working, eating, shopping, budgeting, folding clothes, sleeping, sex, dating, and buying a car.3 The promise of technique is that we are collectively overcoming all the challenges to life through research, technology, and discipline. All you have to do is find the right self-help book or life hack or app or life coach or devotional.

But technique’s promise that life is easier than ever turns out to be just another source of dread and shame: if life doesn’t have to be this hard, if there are answers and methods and practices that can solve my problems, then it really is my fault that I’m overwhelmed or a failure.

But what if our contemporary society is not actually built for us, for humans as God designed us? If that is the case, then sometimes anxiety and depression will be rational and moral responses to a fundamentally disordered environment. As I have argued in my book You Are Not Your Own, this is precisely the kind of society in which we find ourselves.4

But here’s the thing: each morning it’s you. Each morning you must choose to get out of bed or not. All the medication and cognitive therapy and latest research and self-care in the world can’t replace your choice. This decision can be aided by these resources but never replaced by them. Which means that you have to have an answer to a fundamental question: Why get out of bed? Or, more bluntly, why live?

It’s a straightforward question, but it’s easy to ignore until one day it’s all you can think about. Like so many other uncomfortable aspects of modern life, we are well adapted to distracting ourselves from the question of life’s worth. For

You can watch an Apple press conference or the NFL draft. When life feels unbearable, just remember something cool is just around the corner.

But I also suspect that for the vast majority of people, despair, trauma, sorrow, and mental illness remain hidden. Oh yes, some people are talking about mental health openly. Some even turn it into a brand. But the day-to-day experience of adult life has not changed much. “We each suffer our own ghosts,” and mostly alone.

There is a danger, however, in relying too heavily on the language of mental health. My concern is that our expectations of psychological treatments are not realistic. We hope that a diagnosis will provide concrete, specific answers. The unknown is much more frightening than the known, so it can be a great relief to receive a diagnosis. If there’s a diagnosis, we think, there must be a cure. This problem, like all other problems, can be fixed if I just take the right steps and find the correct technique. But if you’ve ever been to counseling for an extended period or been medically treated for a disorder, you know that concrete answers are few and far between.

The best mental health professionals are not scientists who offer precise, empirically objective diagnoses but students of the human heart and soul. They do not provide a taxonomy and rational explanation for your suffering but intuit with wisdom and compassion. They attend to you personally. By grace they may sketch out the contours of your suffering, but sometimes little more than that. They offer a sympathetic ear, wise advice, and ameliorating treatments, but only rarely something like a medical cure. Psychiatrists can sometimes prescribe a medication that helps lessen your suffering, but disturbingly, we aren’t sure how or why many popular antidepressants work.

What we do know is that some medications work effectively for some people sometimes, and we know that untreated depression and anxiety can be deadly. We desperately want mental illnesses to be as objectively diagnosable, measurable, and treatable as something like diabetes. This is what I mean by expectations. When explaining how mental illnesses are real, people will sometimes say something like, “You would never shame someone for having cancer or ascribe their disease to bad character. So why would you shame someone for having a mental illness?”

We have some good theories, but almost nothing is definitive. Good counselors and doctors will tell you this. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies would like us to believe there are objective diagnoses, easy answers, and successful treatments. Sometimes there are, but not usually. We put unrealistic expectations on these fields when we demand objective answers for something so deeply subjective and personal, something that can have genetic, biological, interpersonal, spiritual, economic, and circumstantial causes all at the same time.

We can set it on a table, examine it, and communicate it to others: I am not depressed. I have depression. It is over there and I am over here. My experience has a listing in DSM-5. I can name it. So, maybe it’s manageable after all? Except that mental suffering is never “over there.” It can’t be. By its nature, mental suffering is always experienced subjectively, inside us. And at best, that experience can only be communicated to others in figurative language. “It feels like I’m drowning. Like I’m detached from my body. Like everything is much darker than it used to be.” Remarkably, we can even struggle to communicate an episode of mental illness to ourselves once we are past it. The memory remains but not the experience of it. How can something so intensely intimate and vivid become so alien to us?

When you realize all of this, it’s not hard to fall into despair. Psychology and psychiatry don’t have an answer for why life is worth living despite suffering. They can’t shield you from the question by curing you. They can do a great deal to help us manage our mental suffering, whether it counts as a formal, insurance-approved medical diagnosis or not.

The human capacity for feeling so many variations of mental suffering is remarkable and sobering.

Human existence inescapably involves suffering. For all of human history we have known this to be true. But it’s hard to recall this truth when we are surrounded by forces that promise us greater and greater explanations, control, and strategies of happiness. So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering. Second, there are rarely clear answers to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.

in the end it is always just you and God and your neighbor and the present choice to act, which at root is actually the choice to worship. And that is okay. Really, it is.

What makes this question difficult to answer is that on balance, there may well be times when your life seems more trouble than it’s worth. The pain will outweigh the pleasure. Whatever hopes you have will be overshadowed by your reasonable expectations of suffering. Whatever good you can imagine doing pales before the harm you have already done and will do to others. At times like this, it feels rational to give up on life.

Why doesn’t the man follow his wife? McCarthy gives us at least three reasons, each grounded in a truth beyond the world of the novel. First, the father sees his son as a “warrant” for God’s existence, a witness to the goodness of life (and therefore some kind of Life-Giver) even in a world with few other signs of goodness.15 Second, he believes that God commanded him to protect the life of his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God.”16 The father’s responsibility to God is not subject to speculations about the possibility of reducing his son’s suffering by killing him. Harm reduction is not the ultimate good. What matters to the man, at least by the very end of the novel, is that he fulfills his duty to God to care for the life of his son. Third, the man believes that his own choice to live is a witness to his son that life is good and worth preserving, even through

earthly hope: “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up.”17 In fact, I think the testimony of their actions is one of the main reasons the father begs his wife not to kill herself. He knows that once she commits suicide, his son will see that as a real possibility for himself, and he does.

You need to know that your being in the world is a witness, and it “counts for something.” Your existence testifies. There is no mitigating this fact. There is nowhere you can hide where your life will not speak something to the world. All we can do sometimes is to decide what our existence is a witness to, what it speaks of, and how we can share the burden of witnessing with one another. Many of the truths our lives communicate are beyond our control. For example, because you are made in the image of God, your personhood proclaims the goodness of a Creator God. You can try to denigrate your personhood through self-abuse or self-loathing, but you remain in His image, and so you testify.

When we sin, for example, we not only defy God’s law and harm ourselves and wrong our neighbor. We also lie to our neighbor. Our sin proclaims to others that God’s promises are not enough. Consider this in relation to an extramarital affair. If I were to cheat on my wife, what would that act communicate to my children—to my son and daughters? To my students? To my wife? Setting aside for a moment the tremendous harm such a sin would cause to my marriage, and the pain it would cause my family, what would it tell my children about sacred vows? What would it tell them about love and commitment?

Or what if I cursed out a salesperson who refused to give me a refund? What would that communicate about who is worthy of respect?

But most of all, remember that you are God’s beloved. This means acknowledging the objective reality that life is good, and that despite our distress, we must get up and carry on.

Your existence is a testament, a living argument, an affirmation of creation itself. When you rise each day, that act is a faint but real echo of God’s “It is good.” By living this life, you participate in God’s act of creation, asserting with your very existence that it is a good creation.

Whenever we sin, we wager offense against God and the possibility of uncontainable harm to others (sin is never containable).

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.

The choice to get out of bed is not made once per day but continually as we do the next thing.

The world asks too much of us. And a good number of these demands really are our responsibility: to care for those around us, to use the gifts God has given us, and so on. In my experience, the only way to move forward is to dedicate yourself to doing the next thing.

To do the next thing is not to deny our other responsibilities but to recognize that faithfulness is always an obligation for the present.22 Right now we have a duty to serve God by doing whatever good work He has put before us. And if we trouble ourselves with all the other things we are burdened with, the things of tomorrow or the next hour or minute, we will be overwhelmed.

We have to do all these things without getting lost in perfection, in frantically trying to master our lives by choosing the perfect next thing. Very often it is only by focusing on the concrete details of life, the singular actions demanded of us, that we can keep moving.

So when we encourage depressed and anxious people to be active, get out of the house, and stay busy just so that they’ll feel good enough to stay busy, we may help them get out of a funk, but we aren’t helping them understand the goodness of their existence. Don’t do the next thing just so that you can keep doing the next thing. Do the next thing because it honors God and testifies of His goodness and the goodness of your life to your neighbor.

Moments create momentum. When you choose to do the next thing, neither accepting nor denying the anxiety or depression you carry, you create the momentum that makes the next, next thing a bit easier to manage.

When your days are filled with mundane tasks, none of which are worth posting on social media or even talking about, it can feel impossible to build momentum, to feel like your life is going anywhere for any purpose. This is precisely why we must see that each choice to do the next thing is an act of worship, and therefore fundamentally good. Feeding your pets is an act of worship. Brushing your teeth is. Doing the dishes. Getting dressed. Going to work. Insofar as each of these actions assumes that this life in this fallen world is good and worth living despite suffering, they are acts of faith in God. Choose to do the next thing before and unto God, take a step toward the block.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

It teaches us how to love ourselves. If you flinch a little at the idea of loving yourself, I urge you to reconsider. I

It was only when I read the work of the Christian philosopher Josef Pieper that I became convicted that I really must love myself, that it is an offense to God not to love myself. Pieper describes love as the act of saying, “It’s good that you exist; how wonderful that you are!”23 And that is true about God’s attitude toward us. We know that He delights in our existence because He created us!

So how could we not echo His “It is good” by also loving ourselves, by affirming that it is lovely that we exist?

Similarly, I must believe all things. Maybe most relevantly, I must believe God’s love for me is greater and more perfect than my imagination, that He does not make mistakes. That belief is not countermanded by my experience, my emotions, or the opinions of others. To love myself I must hope all things. This hope is founded on the promises of God, not on my own ability to fix myself or control my circumstances or solve the problems of the world. My hope is in God’s promise to preserve me, to work all things together for my good, to finish the good work He started in me.

I must endure all things—including the torments of my own mind. I may tremble at the agony of life. At times I may feel crushed and overwhelmed and undone, but to love God, I must love myself; and to love my neighbor, I must love myself; and to love myself, I must endure. I cannot do this alone, however. I bear, believe, hope, and endure not from my own capacity for love but with the aid of the Holy Spirit and with the comfort and encouragement of my friends. It is only with the aid of others that I can love myself and thereby honor God’s creation.

Freedom and determinism have no bearing or relevance. They belong to a theoretical way of understanding the world, which has its place, but in practice, no person knows where their agency ends. With few exceptions, we experience each moment as if we have a choice of how we will act. Even when our minds suffocate us with hopelessness and we feel unable to move, we still experience the ability to choose. Whether or not that freedom

Because more basic and essential, more true and real than any psychological explanation of suffering or illness, is our raw, day-to-day experience of living. Acknowledging

God is Judge, not us. The experience of mental suffering is always incommunicable —except to God.

Your affliction does not give you the right to hurt other people, to abuse them, to neglect them, or to mistreat yourself. You

And since our life is a gift of grace and a witness to the goodness of life, and therefore the goodness of the Creator, ending our life must never be a possibility, no matter how strongly we subjectively feel dread, alienation, or fear. We have an obligation to live in the truth, not that our actions redeem us or our neighbor. We act out of gratitude for the sacrifice Christ made for us. And this gratitude will sometimes be felt in your bones and sometimes not be felt at all. But you can still choose to act on that gratitude, embracing the gracious gift of life.

I take the command to cast our anxieties on God not as a simplistic solution to hand over our psychological experience of anxiety, but as acting on the belief that it is God who cares for us, that in fact we can’t care for ourselves.