In his wonderful little book, Trusting God in the Present, Jacques Filippe writes about our tendency to overthink tomorrow and underdo today during trials.
Philippe:
“In this life it is sometimes absolutely necessary that we consent to go forward without understanding.
…. when preoccupied with a question to which you can’t find the answer, ask yourself: ‘Do I absolutely need an answer to that in order to know how I should live my life today?’
You’ll realize that you usually don’t.
….We accept the situation as it is, without aiming to understand it entirely and ask, ‘What does God want of me here? What is the right way to live through this? Which part of the Gospel am I called by this situation to put into practice now? What acts of faith and hope, what progress in love, am I being asked to make today.”
Accepting something totally befuddling and awful is tough for any Christian to do, regardless of medical condition, and it can send anyone into despair.
It might be particularly tough for people with OCD whose brains are wired with a unique capacity to thrive at finding despair in these moments.
We find one question, it cockroaches into 100 more, those critters have colonies of their own, and pretty soon, it’s three hours later and you’re infested with 3,000 troubling questions when all you wanted was the answer to one.
And it all began with a single question: “Why?”
And here’s the problem: We want to understand the Why so we can find a Fix. Makes sense, right? My car is broken, there’s got to be a why, so I take it in, and a new transmission does the trick.
That’s trying to figure out an automobile’s why.
But Scripture and reason itself tell us that we can’t chase the mind of God’s reasons.
History, going back to Job, is a wasteland of saints going to the heavens for an answer and ending up with nothing except this one question that should have been our only one to begin with: “Who am I to question you, oh God?”
And here’s the thing, and it’s what Philippe is getting at. God has already given us the clear answer we need.
To practice, as best we can, faith, hope, and love, in the absence of knowing.
I can say, “God, you’re my Good Shepherd, but you seem to have fallen asleep. What gives?” and then I can answer, “But I know you haven’t. I have faith that Jesus is here.”
Or take hope.
I can say, “God, I put my hope — not in nature’s cruel hand to turn things around — but in your mercy to turn my face around, and towards your son.”
Far too often, we pin our hopes on mercy from other humans, forgetting they’re human, and attach our desperation to a world that’s already fallen to raise us from the ground.
Where is my hope in the Why?
And finally, the greatest of these virtues we can practice (hopefully) during any Why – love.
“God, just as you used your pain on the cross for me, I can use my pain for the world. Help me be a ‘wounded healer’.”
It might be that, in your pain right now, you can “only” close your eyes in prayer for someone, but that opens the heavens in ways we wouldn’t believe.
I often (usually) suck at all these things – faith, hope, and love. Especially during hard times.
It’s easy to have faith, hope, and love when things feel lovely in our lives. During one of the greatest stretches of my life, I thought I was practicing those things when in reality I was just in new love with my girlfriend/now wife.
In fact, in the good times, it’s so easy to “practice faith, hope, and love” that it’s easy to ask whether those are faith, hope, or love.
Each of those virtues implies a resistance to them. Faith can only arise in uncertainty, hope can only be hope during absence, and the deepest Christian love involves bearing the cost and canceling the debt of another’s sin against us.
Each of those things we can do (or try), regardless of circumstance.
We will never get the answer that we want to the Why.
But God has already told us what our answer must be — faith, hope, and love. We can try those things, Gold help us.
May God give us the strength, me the strength.
In the meantime, if you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or any other mood disorder (all medical conditions)….
For readers in the United States…
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.
