I John 3:20: “For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things.”

Depressed, OCD, and anxious Christians tend to condemn themselves all the time… hence, why this verse is so meaningful, and also why you should read my interview with Michael Schiferl on scrupulosity.

And why, if you continue struggling, we should keep reading verses like I John 3:20 and also…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

And also remember this – for many of us, this thing never goes away. But Christ never does, either. He will be with us the whole way, all the way to the end.

In her excellent book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes:

“If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it.

If we don’t face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren’t always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding bitterness, unchecked addiction.

Grief is a ghost that can’t be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”

I love that last line.

Don’t let a Victorious Christian Church Culture pressure you out of a grief that permeates the Psalms, the whole Bible, and Jesus’ own life as a “man of sorrows.”

There’s a strange fusion of Victorious Christian Church and American Optimism at work in most evangelical churches today, wherein you have to always be making progress towards success.

In this case, success from grief.

So they’ll try to find all sorts of ways for you to short-circuit the process.

But grieving itself is the balm for grief. It is not the problem.

As she says, “Grief is a ghost that can’t be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”

Amen.

Elisabeth Elliot isn’t using the word “salvation” here in the sense of adoption by Christ, but in terms of the Christian journey.

And so I think a better word might be “sanctification,” as in becoming more like Jesus won’t always be fun.

And in her book, Suffering is Never for Nothing, Elliot has a particularly good passage on this mysterious cup we all must drink from.

Elliot writes:

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“Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take it because I trust him. Because I know that what God wants for me is the very best. I will receive this one thing in his name.

I need pain sometimes because God has something bigger in mind. It is never for nothing. And so I say Lord, in Jesus’ name, by Your grace I accept it.

…. Paul accepted the thorn even though it wasn’t to his taste and preferences. Jesus accepted the cup and said not My will but Thine be done.

And that same vision and that same principle ought to characterize each of us Christians as we receive, from the hand of God, the cup of salvation with whatever it contains for our ultimate redemption and perfection.

There will be nothing in that cup of salvation except what is necessary.”

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Now, a few points on this.

First, this is absolutely NOT me nodding my head and saying, “Friend, just accept your depression or anxiety or ADHD etc.,”

It would be awful for me to tell you to accept stage 1, treatable cancer as your cup, and not treat it.

Mental health conditions are medical. They are treatable.

Yet… they can be very difficult to treat.

And for many of us, it can take a long time or our entire lives, fighting this beast. It’s our thorn in the flesh.

We absolutely should look for professional help and never stop looking.

But to Elliot’s point, none of this is fun. It’s awful. Even looking for help is hard.

Chemo isn’t fun for a cancer patient. It’s a terrible cup. And searching, year after year, for relief from your own mind’s turmoil is also a terrible cup.

God sees all this, he knows what you’re going through, he wants you to continue looking for help, and so keep looking for it, but if you’re discouraged, know that he understands discouragement better than even you or I do.

He understands rejection better than you or I do. Our Father will never reject us, and yet the Father turned his face from Christ on the cross.

I’ve been through a lot, you’ve been through a lot, we all have cups that often seem more filled with the blood of our tears than the joy of the Lord, right?

But do you remember the Psalm where we learn God numbers our tears?

He sees each drop, and we don’t even know he is crying for and with us, and one day, we won’t even have to look for help because you and I will be in Immanuel’s land where the cup of salvation will overflow with such perfect love and wonder that you’ll see all this was worth it.

Keep going, dear friends. And I will too.

Oh, and as always, please, keep looking for help if you’re struggling.

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

In her book Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren notes that since the dawn of time, humans have feared the night.

Even today (or tonight), with lights and smart devices, we still confront our darkest fears in, well, the dark.

As she writes:

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“Our very bodies confront darkness each night. So each night we practice facing our truest state: we are exposed, we cannot control our lives, we will die.

In the daylight, I’m distracted. At moments, maybe even productive.

At night I feel alone, even in a house full of sleeping bodies, I feel small and mortal.

The darkness of nighttime amplifies grief and anxiety…. we are all so very, very vulnerable.”

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Accurate, no?

Yet she makes this important point: God made the night and called it “good.”

Of course, before the fall, the night wasn’t terrifying, and yet God knew there would be a fall, and created the night anyway.

Warren notes that “In wisdom, God made things such that every day we face a time of darkness,” and yet at the same time, Revelation tells us that night will be “no more,” the day will finally overcome, much as Christ overcame death.

In other words, the fear that comes with night, the time of wrestling Jacob experienced at night, will be crushed.

As such, the night is a distinctly temporal phenomenon, and it seems true that it’s always night (it seems) when we either doubt or trust God the deepest, the truest.

When I was recently hospitalized for many nights, I came to fear the end of visiting hours, the change of shifts, the way the hospital turned quiet – not for rest, but because it was so understaffed that you’d go long periods without seeing or hearing anyone except the strange white noise of a pumping IV line.

I never knew which night I was getting — one where I’d find God, or one where I felt he’d left at 8 PM, along with the other visitors.

But whatever the case, I needed to confront my faith in God every night, and I think that as both Christians and people prone to depression, anxiety, chronic pain, or anything else troubling, the nights, oh the nights — they can be awful.

In the day, we can at least try to do something about our problems, right?

At night, our problems just sit there, and we’re too tired to work on them, and too anxious to sleep on them.

And in those moments, we look for God and hope to find him with a raw passion that’s difficult to muster in the day.

Well, just remember, that in those times, God has already found us, and many times, before dawn, by God’s grace, we will realize that he is holding us, and has been the whole time.

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

In her book, Suffering Is Never for Nothing, Elisabeth Elliot writes:

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“There have been hard things in my life, of course, as there have been in yours, and I cannot say to you, I know exactly what you’re going through.

But I can say that I know the One who knows.”

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By the way, this has always seemed to me the simplest and best answer to the suffering question – “I don’t know why, but I do know that God is good.”

Some Christians try to call suffering a way for God to grow us.

Sometimes, maybe. But certainly not always.

Job’s suffering was part of a cosmic dispute. He was probably the most “grown” Christian in the world at the time.

Further, we live in a fallen world where people suffer. That’s baked into the cake and every single experience we have with that cake.

If someone says God is bringing suffering to “grow you,” that’s not only cruel or theologically dubious. It’s outright blasphemy because you are speaking for God.

Now, of course, we can grow during our suffering, but it’s blasphemous to attribute our suffering to God’s plan for our growth when we have no idea why he did it.

Job’s friends tried that route, and God rebuked them severely for trying to divine his divine message.

Other Christians will say suffering is a way for God to discipline us.

Sometimes, but it seems extremely rare.

Why?

A few reasons.

First, how often did Jesus correct his disciples through making them suffer?

He rebukes those guys left and right for their daily sins, and yet he never inflicts sudden, painful suffering on them for it.

And if anyone needed to grow spiritually, it was the ones who’d soon be carrying his message to the rest of the world.

Yet there’s not a single record of Jesus inflicting suffering on his disciples as a way of “growing them.”

Second, if God used suffering as his primary means of our growth and discipline, we’d be suffered right out of existence by the week’s end.

He’s just not that kind of Father. He’s a good one. Not an abusive one, who makes us suffer every time we sin. Again, our lives would be relentless suffering if that were the case, because we sin every day.

Of course, there are loads of other, common reasons Christians give for suffering, but none really answers the question adequately which is why there are new books written constantly on the issue.

We can appreciate reading them, but deep in our hearts, we still don’t quite understand suffering, do we?

And we have to accept that’s okay.

There are a million things we don’t understand about the universe and human life itself, that we can’t explain, that we admit are beyond our scope.

Why would the enormous complexity of suffering be any different?

That’s why I like that quote from Elliot so much.

Even though she unfortunately looks for reasons in the rest of her book, I think it’s dangerous to look for reasons in our own lives.

Why God brings suffering, in each particular case? That’s unknowable.

Jesus himself says God makes his rain to fall on the just and unjust, which speaks to the mystery of suffering and the fact the answer is reserved for God.

But note that — the answer is reserved for God.

If we believe that God is loving, our Father, then the answer is safe in his hands.

Having said all that, if you’re suffering from depression, there’s help for that suffering!

Depression and other mental health conditions are medical, and a type of suffering that is, thus, best treated medically. However that looks.

And for some good ideas…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.