The Weary Christian is about the depressive feelings you’re too scared to share with your Christian friends for fear they’ll pull out a Bible, put their hands on your back, and just say:
“Dear brother, you’re A Joint-Heir-Adopted-Into-His-Family-Bound-For-Heaven. Meditate on that!”
Then you go home and straight to bed – feeling ten times worse.
Why? Because now you feel guilty that being A Joint-Heir-Adopted-Into-His-Family-Bound-For-Heaven means nothing to you.
Even worse, if it means nothing to you, maybe you’re not A Joint-Heir-Adopted-Into-His-Family-Bound-For-Heaven. Which makes you even more depressed.
The reality isn’t that you’re sinfully ungrateful, it’s that you might suffer from chronic inflammation.
The Weary Christian is about the panicked feelings inside that make you wonder how God could really be a part of you.
“The Spirit of God lives inside me, but I feel inexplicable dread every night. Does that mean the Spirit feels dread too? Should I take a tranquilizer for him and me?”
You know that’s ridiculous, and it leaves you with only one terrifying conclusion – do I really have the Spirit of God inside me?
The reality is that these feelings of dread probably have more to do with a neurotransmitter such as gamma-aminobutyric acid than the indwelling Spirit. And quite possibly, more to do with bad gut bacteria.
The Weary Christian is about the dark feelings you’re too afraid to share with your non-Christian friends because you worry they’ll be so disillusioned by the “lights of the world” that they’ll lose all interest in becoming one themselves.
After all, if one of the lights of the world feels like turning himself off, who’d really want to invite Jesus in?
“Hey Jim, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. I actually hate mine though and want to end it.”
The reality is that a “light of the world” has more to do with how we treat others than it does the Hallmark glow of our face, or the width of our smile. And when we present a false self, the rest of the world doesn’t see saints, they see sanctimony.
The Weary Christian is about the grief, loss, and sadness that we hide because the church tells us the joy of the Lord is supposed to pierce through all of that.
The reality is that Jesus was a man of sorrows, and that there’s no verse recorded where Jesus dismisses sadness and suffering by saying, “You know what, Peter — I just want to be uplifted today. Let’s only talk about beautiful things.”
So who am I?
I’m Christian Heinze, and some of you know me as a political blogger from the 2012 presidential race, first for my own site and then for The Hill.
Hi, old friends!
I left all that in 2013 when, 20,000 posts later, I realized that I couldn’t possibly write the following sentences again.
“X is going to New Hampshire on his book tour, but insists he has no plans on running for president.”
I just plain old burnt.out.
So why am I starting The Weary Christian?
Well, if we’re able to, we all want to follow our passion, and this site reflects just that. I am a Christian — a sinner saved by grace, a child of God.
Two words on being a sinner saved by grace and a child of God.
The beauty of Christianity is this — there is nothing more disheartening than suddenly realizing you can’t save yourself. And there is nothing more heartening than suddenly realizing you can’t save yourself.
The sentence that was horrifying becomes beautiful. The helplessness of feeling unable to win grace becomes thankfulness that it’s already been given. Robert Capon says that the glory of the Gospel is that it’s an “announcement that the saved are already home before they even started.”
Thus, the line goes from Mozart’s Requiem:
“Remember, merciful Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey.”
And again.
“Remember, merciful Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey.”
As for the “child of God” part, I will never understand how the Father can love me as he loves Christ (John 17:23). God sent his son to die for me. You don’t send your son to die for someone you just love. You don’t. We are not merely loved, we are something else. We are “I feel so XYZD for you that I’m going to kill my only son for your sake.” Is that XYZD really just love? What’s it got to be for that sentence to actually make sense? It has to be stronger than love. It has to be the love of a parent, which defies even the word “love”, and it is.
So before I call myself a “Christian,” I call myself a child of God, and I feel loveless if I think I am anything else, because to be outside God’s family is to be outside the greatest love that matters for life and the only love that matters in death.
But the other part of my core is that I have life-long depression, and am prone to anxiety and panic attacks.
Thus, I am a child of God and, often, a child of terrible nights and miserable days. Both helped and helpless.
When you’re depressed, you go through long periods where you read your Bible and think you’re the only one on earth outside the bounds of God’s forgiveness and love.
You don’t abandon your belief in salvation or forgiveness, you only abandon the idea it applies to you. Every good thing in life has fine print, and you are the fine print to “I will never again remember their sins and lawless deeds.” (Hebrews 10:17).
The Bible’s promises become selective to your mood. You can read it all day and night, but you will only accept the judgment and never the forgiveness. This isn’t the Spirit convicting you. This is your depression trying to destroy you. The Spirit convicts towards redemption. Not destruction.
And this is how depression can destroy our Christian life. When depression turns us relentlessly fatalistic, negative, and dark, it naturally colors our view of Christianity and since our Christianity is the most important thing to us, it can then become the most oppressive thing to us.
When I’m depressed, terrible music becomes more terrible, but it doesn’t become an existential crisis because I can turn it off. But when I’m depressed, Christianity still remains larger than anything else. So if everything is dark, this becomes more so than anything else because it is my “more so than anything else” — the thing I’ve given my life to. It is the biggest thing, so it becomes the biggest dark.
Zack Eswine puts it this way:
“If someone struggles with biological or circumstantial depression, they are more vulnerable to spiritual sorrows. It is hard enough to get through the day without adding the displeasure of God to the trauma that already trounces us.”
This is where non-Christians will come and attack — “See, your Christianity and God have made things worse!” No, an improper view of God’s love and grace has made things worse. It’s not Christianity that’s oppressing me, it’s my misinterpretation of it. If I think God is hating me when he’s made it clear he loves me that’s on me; not him. And that misinterpretation, that negativity is based on a depression that takes the worst view of everything.
This is what the church doesn’t get about depression and mental illness. It is a medical condition that leads to spiritual hurt — not the other way around. The depression leads to the misinterpretation of Christ, it’s not the misinterpretation that leads to “spiritual depression.” If you treat the mental illness, you treat the faltering Christian spirit. In my experience and in that of nearly everyone I know, when I get help for my depression, my spiritual walk always gets better.
Now here’s the deal — if I were unique in this dissonance, The Weary Christian would be a stupid idea. But the Christian church is filled with people like myself.
Christians who live somewhere between the wonderful reality of John 15 (“I am leaving you with a gift-peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give”) and the fun of I Kings 19 Elijah (“It’s too much, Lord. Take away my life. I might as well be dead!”).
Yet, historically, the church has done a terrible job at acknowledging this, even though the prevalence of mental illness in the church is nearly as high as outside of the church (in fact, one survey found that 38.7% of church leaders themselves have suffered from a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar, and 23% from an anxiety disorder).
It has often told us that we are actually sinning when depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems slip into bed with us.
Such condemnation isn’t just wrong, it’s bad theology, bad science, and it’s dangerous.
In a survey, Dr. Matthew Stanford found that 25% of churches specifically tell their congregants not to take antidepressants or psychiatric medicine of any kind. Twenty-five percent! Imagine 25% of churches telling diabetics to forgo treatment.
And that message filters down.
According to a LifeWay Research study, half of evangelical Christians think that prayer and Bible study alone can cure serious mental illness.
Ed Stetzer responded appropriately to the study:
“God can absolutely miraculously intervene and right a chemical imbalance, He can do the same for a broken leg. Yet virtually everyone acknowledges there is nothing wrong with going to the doctor for the latter.”
Now of course, not everyone needs medicine. But for some, our lives depend on it.
At some point, I’ll write more about my story, but unless I had found a medicine and therapy that worked, I’d be dead. Many others would be, too.
It’s popular to say the Christian church needs to “step into the 21st century” on a number of issues. Christians debate which ones all the time.
But there’s one issue no one really hashtags about the church today, and it’s one of the most important — our dangerous and tragic failure to confront mental health within our ranks.
Over the course of this site’s lifespan (may it be long and reach a ripe, old age — just like one of the good kings of Old Testament Israel), I’ll be addressing all that.
I want so much to let you — and myself — know that we are not alone, we are loved, that we are not bad Christians because we are sad Christians, that we are not failures because our minds have hijacked our intentions.
Maybe you’ve felt that the church has looked at your weakness and judged. Well, God looks at your weakness and loves.
In a sermon called “The Tenderness of Jesus,” Charles Spurgeon said:
“Jesus is touched, not with a feeling of your strength but of your infirmity…. as the mother feels with the weakness of her babe, so does Jesus feel with the poorest, saddest, and weakest.”
I want this site to remind you of that because this disease can take everything from us, including our pride, but that is when Jesus is most likely to stop by and say “Can I dine here tonight?” Not because he needs us, but because we need him.
Now let me give you a giant caveat emptor — as much as I want it to help, it’s not a fix-it place. It’s not a “come here and get better” promise. You’re not that naive, and neither am I.
Is it anticlimactic and pointless to have a website about a pervasive problem without offering a fix-you promise?
Well, listen to your favorite songs, and you’ll find a unifying theme. They are about emotions and feelings, not answers or solutions. And yet that’s enough.
Songs don’t solve anything, except to tell us that we’re not alone when we feel the pain of disappearing love or the joy of unexpected passion.
They are universal affirmations of our isolated feelings, and in telling us that our emotions are universal, we don’t feel as alone.
That, in and of itself, is an incredible comfort.
So finding out you’re not alone in this struggle, that other Christians are going through pain that seems impervious to the inspiration section of Christian booksellers — I think that’s helpful.
It will often feel gloomy, but gloomy is honest and honest is what we want.
And the honest truth is this: we are all born with imperfect bodies and they are all imperfect differently, and for those who struggle with mental battles, this is our thing. Some people don’t have enough white blood cells, and my brain and yours just don’t run as smoothly as others.
So no, I don’t want this site to sell you false hope. I truly believe mental health conditions are similar to chronic autoimmune conditions which periodically flare up until the day Jesus comes for us. We can treat them, and it can help, but for many of us, these are life-long conditions. Yes, there can be some “healing,” but healing is very different from healed. We can feel the former on earth, we will only get the latter in heaven.
So, here on earth, we will sometimes feel better and praise God, and we will sometimes feel worse and probably question God. But Christ’s love isn’t levered to our emotions.
Even if you can’t feel that love, you will see it one day when Jesus confirms your hope, smiling, face-to-face, “Enter into the joy of the Lord.”
In his classic novel, Diary of a Country Priest, George Bernanos wrote:
“I feel such distress that has forgotten even its name, that has ceased to reason or to hope, that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ.”
And everyone who’s struggled to say Amen in this life — will then say Amen.
Christian Heinze is a writer and the editor of The Weary Christian.
