Pared To Truth

The Bruised Reed in the Dark, Part 3: No Shelter for the Weary

“The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness, but who can bear a broken spirit?” (Proverbs 18:14)

Scripture recognizes the distinction. A man may endure bodily pain, loss, exhaustion, and hardship so long as some inward strength remains to carry him through them; but when the spirit itself is crushed, the very faculty by which suffering is borne has been injured. And of all the afflictions and trials that may come upon a person, depression must rank among the hardest for this very reason.

As Christians, we are spared none of the common sufferings of this world. We endure illness, bereavement, betrayal, disappointment, poverty, fear, and death alongside everyone else. Indeed, a good case can be made that believers pass through all the trials common to mankind and, in addition, may also face others peculiar to faith itself.

And depression adds precisely such a burden. Terrible enough in its own right, it may also cause the believing sufferer to experience the restraint of hope as the rejection of God. The One whom he knows to be the source of comfort, forgiveness, and eternal life now seems absent from him. The refuge remains true in doctrine, yet inaccessible to the heart, sometimes for months or even years.

How terrifying even one night under the sense of God’s rejection feels to those who know Him can be fully understood only by those who have endured it.

Not all have had to walk through it, thankfully, yet all should be instinctively familiar with its reality from the pages of Scripture. Dejection of spirit, anguish of soul, fear, exhaustion, despair, and the collapse of human strength are not foreign to the people of God; they appear throughout the biblical record, sometimes in men and women of extraordinary faith.

And yet we are often the quickest to draw shallow conclusions when a brother or sister is struck by clinical depression.

In fact, churches often become places of aggravated anxiety for the depressed believer. Teaching on the subject, especially in evangelical circles, has frequently encouraged an almost immediate thumping of the Bible at anyone whose spirit remains less than grateful for more than a few weeks. Before anyone has tried to understand what has happened, the verses arrive, followed by the questions and suspicions: Are you praying? Are you reading Scripture? Are you trusting the Lord? Is there some hidden sin? Why are you not at peace?

These are not always illegitimate questions, and there may be a proper time for some of them. But when they are asked quickly, mechanically, and without sensitivity, they become less like care and more like an examination conducted over an open wound.

The depressed Christian soon learns that honesty may cost him whatever refuge he still has. And so he hides, smiles when expected, says he is tired, leaves quickly after church, and learns to speak in safe sentences while carrying an unsafe mind. More commonly, however, he simply stops attending altogether.

Sadly, the world has often been a more bearable place for him than the church.

I say this not only from my own experience, but from hearing the testimony of many others who have told remarkably similar stories. Again and again, suffering believers describe finding more patience in a counselor’s room, more realism in a doctor’s office, and more mercy from an unbelieving friend than among people who profess to follow the Man of Sorrows.

Why is that?

Well, a congregation generally follows the posture of its leaders. And it often takes depression striking very close to the home of church leadership before attitudes begin to change. A struggling relative at some distance may not be enough. But when a pastor’s wife cannot rise from bed for weeks, when an elder’s child becomes suicidal, or when a respected family discovers that prayer and discipline have not prevented the nervous system from breaking down, harsh certainties may begin to soften.

Until then, the depressed believer is often regarded as having weaker faith, a defect of character, or perhaps some hidden sin brought to light by his inability to rejoice sufficiently in the knowledge that he has a Savior.

It really is often that shallow.

What is remarkable, of course, is that these same Christians would rarely interpret physical illness the same way.

A believer may develop cancer without being suspected of having insufficient faith, require insulin without overhearing whispered concerns that dependence upon medication conflicts with dependence upon God, or undergo surgery without being warned that medical intervention could interrupt the sanctifying work of providence. Most Christians understand that physical illness cannot ordinarily be reduced to a spiritual diagnosis made from the outside.

When it comes to depression, however, everyone becomes a theologian.

People who would never presume to interpret an abnormal heart rhythm feel entirely qualified to interpret a disordered mind. They diagnose motives, assign spiritual causes—to the point of suggesting what is self-inflicted and what is “proper” depression—recommend treatments, and explain what God is doing in the sufferer’s life, often with almost no knowledge of psychiatry, neurology, trauma, medication, or the person’s actual condition.

A sufferer says that he cannot see a future, and someone answers with a verse before considering whether he may be in immediate danger.

Few areas of suffering have exposed the church’s failures more painfully than depression. Untold souls have been greeted with suspicion when they needed gentleness, instructed when they needed safety, and rebuked when they needed someone simply to remain beside them.

Even when the judgment is couched in spiritual language, weakness often remains the underlying suspicion: weak faith, weak discipline, weak character, weak prayer.

But how did we ever come to regard weakness as something unexpected among believers?

Scripture does not teach that believers cease to be weak. It teaches that we are weak and that the power by which we stand is not our own. Faith is not a reserve of strength stored in superior personalities, nor is perseverance the achievement of those who possess more inward steel than others. Both are gifts of grace.

The church is not a gathering of the naturally resilient congratulating one another for remaining upright. It is a gathering of the poor in spirit and the needy. We confess that apart from Christ we can do nothing, and then become impatient when someone among us proves the point too visibly.

But it actually gets worse.

This presumption becomes especially dangerous when the subject of psychiatric medication arises. Many churches have no formal teaching against it, but privately sufferers may be warned that medication merely conceals the real problem, dulls the spiritual senses, or interferes with whatever work God intends to accomplish through the trial.

Seriously?

Would we tell a man with unbearable physical pain that medication might interfere with God’s pruning, or advise a diabetic to delay insulin until the spiritual significance of his condition becomes clear?

Medicine is not infallible. Psychiatric medications can have serious side effects, may be overprescribed or prescribed badly, and often require careful adjustment under competent supervision. But those are medical judgments, not slogans, and church leaders who are unqualified to prescribe medication are equally unqualified to tell a sufferer to stop taking it—nay, unqualified even to hint at it.

Considering what depression can do—how it can distort judgment, extinguish hope, and bring a person dangerously close to self-destruction—presumptuous counsel is not merely insensitive; it can place an already vulnerable life in greater danger.

How did we arrive there, theologically, anyway?

Most Christians understand that the fall of man has affected the whole creation. Our bodies weaken, malfunction, deteriorate, and die. The heart can fail, the lungs can scar, the immune system can turn against the body it was meant to defend, hormones can become disordered, nerves can misfire, and memory can disappear.

Why, then, would the brain be exempt?

The brain does not cease to be an organ because its disorders affect thought, emotion, perception, motivation, and desire. The nervous system is no less bodily because its suffering is experienced inwardly. Mental disorders may involve moral, spiritual, relational, circumstantial, and physiological dimensions in complex combinations.

But complexity does not make illness unreal.

By what teaching of Scripture have we concluded that every part of the body bears the damage of the fall except the part through which we think and feel?

Much of the confusion arises from simplistic readings (so often the culprit!) of particular biblical commands and promises. Christ tells us not to be anxious. Paul commands believers to rejoice. Scripture speaks of power, love, self-control, and a sound mind. The Psalms repeatedly call the soul to hope in God.

All of this is true, and none of it should be diminished. But a command identifies the posture of heart to which believers are ordinarily called; it does not establish that every departure from that posture has the same cause, much less that every such departure is disobedience.

“Do not be anxious” cannot mean that every experience of pathological anxiety is nothing more than deliberate disobedience. If that were the proper interpretation, every weary believer would be guilty of refusing Christ’s call to rest, every confused believer guilty of rejecting the command to understand, and every grieving believer guilty of resisting the command to rejoice.

Nor does the promise of a sound mind teach that Christians are immune from disorders affecting the mind. Believers remain susceptible to dementia, delirium, trauma, psychosis, anxiety disorders, and depression. A text describing the gift and work of God cannot be turned into a universal guarantee that no Christian nervous system will ever become seriously ill.

Such interpretations do not defend Scripture; they flatten it into something childishly simplistic and wooden.

The Bible’s own testimony is far more honest. The psalmists groan, protest, question, and plead. Job curses the day of his birth. Elijah sits beneath a tree and asks that he might die. Jeremiah wishes that he had never been born. Jonah says that death would be better than life. Paul writes of being burdened beyond his strength, so greatly that he despaired even of life.

These were not all the same condition, and we should not impose a modern clinical diagnosis upon every biblical expression of anguish. But neither may we pretend that such words describe nothing more than an ordinary bad day.

These were people of faith brought to the limits of human endurance, and Scripture is not embarrassed by them. It does not edit their prayers into cheerful language or teach that genuine believers never speak from terror, exhaustion, confusion, or despair. Instead, it shows us that the life of faith may include seasons in which a servant of God cannot see clearly, stand strongly, or feel what he knows he ought to feel.

Christians of all people should know how to walk carefully when crossing paths with a brother or sister under such a trial. We do not know what God may be doing in that darkness, and it is not ours to declare it. That is reason enough to speak less confidently—and to take off our shoes before we speak at all.

Depression, like any severe trial, is often God’s holy ground. That will be the subject of the next part.