For those of you who know my dad, you know that growing up, my family didn’t celebrate a lot of holidays. When most people were anticipating a day off work or school, excited to spend time with family, my dad was bemoaning the fact that the mail wouldn’t come and the banks would be closed.
But I like milestones and celebrations, and so today – thanks to drugs and an intelligent psychiatrist – today I celebrate. Today I celebrate saying yes to a drug 4 months ago that has saved my sanity. Today I mark 4 months without a panic attack and 1 month completely off xanax. Today I celebrate few tears and a quiet mind.
When I look back to the worst times in my mental health, I don’t always see what God was trying to teach me. To be honest, I don’t really feel like I learned all that much. And what I did learn doesn’t seem like a fair return of what I went through. I think sometimes as Christians, when we come to the end of something, our first question we ask is “what was the reason?” and the mistake we make isn’t in asking the question, it’s in answering the question. We feel like we have to stamp some sort of answer on it to make it seem worth it. And we come to some sort of muddled conclusion and say, here’s the reason, because God taught me THIS. Yet in the back of our mind we’re thinking, but he could have taught me that in a different way.
But we shouldn’t be so quick to give answers. We shouldn’t be so afraid to leave things open-ended. It’s not a crisis of faith if you don’t have an answer. Think about what you did learn and be content to leave it out on the table, unfinished. God doesn’t always desire an answer because answers are limits, and God is limitless.
Be content with saying, I don’t know why, but I know Who.
And rest in the truth that physical health has nothing to do with spiritual health.
When I’m unwell, it’s because of sin; because Adam was my representative in the Garden of Eden, and he failed. And so because my representative failed me, I inherited disease and decay as soon as I was formed. Adam wasn’t the “best” representative. He didn’t make the same decision that every other human in existence would have made; he was just the chosen representative. And I have to accept the fact that I died that day in the Garden. And because I died that day, I have to live with the consequences of a corrupt world. But as equally unfair as it was that I was condemned that day, how equally unfair is it that Christ became my next representative. And in him, I was made whole that day he hung on the crude pieces of wood, haphazardly nailed together. How beautifully unfair. Jesus didn’t heal my soul when I found a drug that worked because my soul was never broken. And if he never healed my body, it wouldn’t matter, because my body doesn’t affect my soul. No matter how sick my body is or how healthy it is, it has no bearing on the condition of my soul. Thank God that my soul is always well.
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