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

by Alan Noble

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.

Our being is a result of gratuitous love by God, and we honor that gift by participating fully in it, even when participating in being feels unbearable.

In my experience, with few exceptions, life doesn’t slow down, and some things don’t “get better.” You either choose to receive the beauty and wonder of this life in the midst of chaos and distress or you never will.

It is possible to loathe and be deeply ashamed of our mental state while at times feeling a kind of validation from it, a sense that our experience is somehow more significant or dramatic than “normal life” because of our burden, especially if we have a diagnosis. Or perhaps it relieves us of the unbearable pressure of our highly competitive meritocracy to know that we are not “normal.”

Your suffering does not make you special. It does not make your life more interesting, significant, compelling, or heroic. It doesn’t make for a better story. It doesn’t even make you worthy of love or compassion. What makes you worthy of love and compassion is the objective reality that God created you in His image and is preserving you right now.

As you choose each day to act faithfully in the gift of life God has given you, you affirm the goodness of all His creation. You testify through your actions that your neighbor’s life is good, that your child’s life is a beautiful gift, and that your friends’ lives are instances of God’s grace. For if you are not God’s good creation, then neither am I and neither is anyone else. And if that’s the case, I really don’t know what we are doing putting up with all this suffering.