May is both Mental Health Awareness Month and National Foster Care Month. Having experienced the mental health issues that plague children in foster care, I think it's fitting those two issues share the same space. And I think we, as a society, should do a better job of caring for our weakest members; but that's a sermon for another day. For now, I will leave you with this excerpt from Ryan Casey Waller's book, Depression, Anxiety, and Other Things We Don't Want to Talk About:
Why is this the world we live in?
The best answer I can find is the one revealed in the first pages of Genesis when God created humans and made them distinct from other creatures in a very particular manner: He gave us freedom.
God told Adam and Eve that they could have their run of the garden of Eden. They had total dominion over the land and could do as they saw fit with only one exception: They were not to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But you know the story. They did just that, demonstrating in that moment what has been and remains true for all of humanity: we have the freedom to choose what we do in this life.
God, apparently, loves freedom....
Could God have set this whole affair up differently? Of course. God is God, and God can do whatever God wants to do. But this is what God has done. This is the world we live in, and this is the world we must learn to make sense of if we are to find some semblance of peace within the suffering.
...Mental illness is not the fault of any one individual but rather a disappointing reality for what it means to live life on this earth.
To accept this mindset requires a certain deference and humility toward God, for it could be easy to stamp our feet and demand that it ought not to be so....
This brand of humility is exemplified quite beautifully in the words from a survivor of Auschwitz:
It never occurred to me to question God’s doing or lack of doings while I was an inmate at Auschwitz, although of course, I understand others did… I was no less or no more religious because of what the Nazis did to us; and I believe my faith in God was not undermined in the least. It just never occurred to me to associate the calamity we were experiencing with God, to blame Him, or to believe in Him less or to cease believing in Him at all because He didn’t come to our aid.
God doesn’t owe us that. Or anything. We owe our lives to Him. If someone believes God is responsible for the death of six million because He didn’t somehow do something to save them, he’s got his thinking reversed. We owe God our lives for the few or many years we live, and we have the duty to worship Him and do all that He commands us. That’s what we’re here on this earth for, to be in God’s service, to do God’s bidding. [Reeve Robert Brenner, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014), 102.]
There is something to this. It is hard to swallow, for sure, but there is a deep truth in these words. If our purpose in life is to journey back to God and become fully human along the way, then, yes, we must oppose suffering at every opportunity; but to find ourselves stuck in an existential crisis over the nature of this existence is to miss the boat entirely. The point, as a Christian, is not to eradicate all suffering or even overcome suffering but to endure it faithfully and ease it in people and places when we are able to do so, as Jesus did.
...God doesn’t stop every panic attack, nor does He stay the finger on the trigger of a barrel pointed in one’s own mouth. He doesn’t prevent the brain from sloshing into dementia, nor does He protect children from a father who promises to come home early but stays at the bar all night instead. He doesn’t stop these things. What He does, I believe, is experience them with us.
He rides out the panic attack, feeling its uncontrolled bursts of adrenaline, and His hands shake as the suicidal person quakes with fear and hatred and utter despair. He comes alongside the disappointed boy, who only wished to see his father for a few moments before bedtime.
He does not take this pain away. What He does is envelope Himself in it and whisper:
Me too.
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