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

by Alan Noble

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.

We do a great disservice to one another by overly relying on the technical language of mental health. It ends up demarcating legitimate from illegitimate mental affliction. And if only medically diagnosed mental suffering counts, people will become desperate to find a diagnosis that validates their affliction. But in the end, we’re still faced with the same choice: How will you act? All other questions and methods and labels fade into the background when confronted with the question of why we should get out of bed.

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.

Professional help can guide you and medication can assist you—at their best they are means of healing from God—but 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.

We almost never take the witness of our actions seriously enough. I suspect that’s because if we did, it would frighten us. It’s scary to realize that my every decision communicates to people around me something about the nature of God, the goodness of His creation and laws. It means that my sin is never containable. It’s never something I can “make right.” The effects of my actions ripple throughout time and space, drawing in more and more people, for good and for ill.

Whenever, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we turn from sin and choose to honor God and love our neighbor, we wager our fleshly desires. Like Paul, it costs us to obey. To deny sin is to die to self. And that, too, testifies to those watching.

Instead, we ought to focus on two things that are our business. First, we ought to bear one another’s burdens. We can’t save someone else, but we are responsible to love our neighbor. You may need to sit with someone through a particularly dark night to ensure that they don’t harm themself. You may need to help them check in to an inpatient program. You may need to ask them difficult questions about suicidal thoughts and plans, or ensure that they don’t have access to a gun. You certainly need to pray with and for them.

Second, we must not excuse or overlook our sin because of a mental affliction. Your affliction does not give you the right to hurt other people, to abuse them, to neglect them, or to mistreat yourself. You have no business judging the sincerity of someone else’s fight against depression and suicide, but you do have a responsibility to endure suffering without excusing sin in your own life.

And don’t think you can control who witnesses your life, like a celebrity carefully curating their public image—as if you could contain your life, hiding the shameful parts so that they only affect you. That’s not how life works.

Where did we get the idea that our responsibilities to one another are optional, rather than given by God?

Similarly, 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. That is the lesson at the center of Christianity: we cannot live a fully human life apart from God.

But there is another implication: if our suffering is common, then we should not hide it but instead help others bear it.

As soon as you decide in your heart to spurn God’s gifts—beauty, love, a good meal, laughter, and so on—because you feel unworthy or unfit, you are denying the reality of God’s grace.

And we know that failing to care for ourselves (mentally or physically) is also a failure to love others.

It is pride and selfishness not to allow others to enter into your suffering. Who are you to hinder someone’s chance to sacrificially love you? Besides, none of us can make it without the help of others.

You can’t cease being useful to God because you were never useful to begin with.