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

by Alan Noble

we sometimes think that if we just stay in bed and go back to sleep, we won’t have to face our depression, anxiety, suffering, or fears.

You can even destroy your life by giving up all hope and devoting yourself to fleeting, vacuous, mind-numbing pleasures.

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.

Of course, when you get to this place, you will not be in a rational state of mind. You may think that you are calmly and objectively evaluating whether or not to live or get out of bed, but you won’t be. If you speak to friends, they will remind you that you are wrong, that it’s the illness talking and life is worth living.

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.

While God’s grace is sufficient for our sins, we do well to recognize the consequences of our sins.

The Judge of all has declared His creation—of which you are no small part, no mistake, and no error—to be good. There is no countermanding that declaration. We can choose to accept that our lives are objectively good before God, or we can deny it.

It’s brave to get up knowing that any number of unimagined horrors may greet you.

The decision to get out of bed is the decision to live. It is a claim that life is worth living despite the risk and uncertainty and the inevitability of suffering—one of the few things we can know for certain in this life.

To choose to go on is to proclaim with your life, and at the risk of tremendous suffering, that it is good. Even when it is hard, it is good. Even when you don’t feel that it is good, even when that goodness is unimaginable, it is good.

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. God asks only that we serve Him now.

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.

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.

To love myself, my neighbor, and God, I must bear all things. Not only all the wrongs and offenses caused by my spouse, family, or even strangers, but also the sufferings I experience internally. The ones brought on by mental illness or the circumstances of life. I bear up under the suffering, resting on God and those closest to me, because in bearing with suffering, I love God by loving myself.

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.

The devil would like nothing more than to persuade you that your life is meaningless, for it is in the destruction of what God has made good that the devil seeks to defy God.

Whatever you are suffering, it will only last a little while. That little while may be a week, or it may be your entire life. How is that comforting? Because the ending is already written: you will overcome, Christ has redeemed and will glorify you, including your flawed and, in some cases, ill mind.

we must remember that the decision to scorn the goodness of our own life is always an invitation for others to scorn their lives too.

And if we make a practice of it, a practice of defying our anxiety and depression by getting out of bed and just giving a few moments of silent prayer of thanks for this life that maybe we still loathe—that pleases God.

we don’t answer this question once in some dramatic moment of revelation that clarifies our lives forever. The choice to live is made every moment of every day, consciously or unconsciously. And in the midst of chronic suffering, whether in the form of a mental illness or a lingering life tragedy that weighs on your spirit, making the conscious choice to get out of bed grows stale and wearisome.

The challenge is to live in this tension, to honestly and accurately discern when you need to step away from certain responsibilities in order to heal, and when you need to bear those responsibilities with your suffering for the sake of others.

Some days that may be all you have: the knowledge that God loves you and desires you to get out of bed, regardless of all the reasons you may find to give up. So you act out your peace in fear and trembling.

Your task is to be faithful: to do the next thing. And when you cannot get up on your own, let someone carry you, knowing that in due time you will be called on to do the same for others. And when you are blessed with the responsibility of carrying someone else, then your own experience with suffering, your own experience of depending on others, will give you the wisdom and empathy you need to love them well.