I walked in circles around the prayer chapel at our Bible college, begging for God to heal my friend’s mom. Someone announced in chapel that morning that her mom was dying of cancer and from the stage, they prayed that God would give her family peace as they navigate the coming grief. I thought to myself, coming grief?? Why are they so sure she’s gonna die?? I left chapel early, ran to the prayer chapel, and prayed and prayed and prayed. Walking in circles, praying in faith, doing all the things I knew to do to move the hand of God, certain that my faith was enough to change the outcome.
She died.
I believed God could heal her, because the year before, he’d healed me. I’d been trying to impress this boy I liked by pretending to jump over an invisible boulder. (subscribe for more dating tips.) My little trick work because I ended up marrying the boy, but I fractured my knee in the process. It was immediately swollen and bruised. I couldn’t walk or put any pressure on it. I also didn’t have health insurance so I found a pair of unpadded crutches in the basement of my dorm, wrapped some scarves around arms, and called it a day. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to pray for healing. It didn’t seem serious enough to bother Jesus about that.
But one day, I was sitting on a couch in our dorm common room, waiting for a party start. One of my classmates was walking around the room, touching everything and everyone and praying, as she was prone to do. (If you haven’t caught on yet, this was most definitely a charismatic/pentecostal Bible college. We paced and prayed a lot.) As my friend walked by, she gently brushed her fingers across my fractured knee. She didn’t even stop her pacing. Just a casual walk-by prayer. As her fingers left my knee, I felt what I can only describe as hot oil being poured over my knee. My knee, quite literally, felt hot and wet. I was so confused that I took my knee brace off to try and figure out what was happening. Maybe it was poor circulation? Was I sweaty? Was she sweaty? I couldn’t figure it out. As I was getting ready to put my knee brace on, I bent my knee slightly, on accident, and instead of feeling resistance or pain, I felt … nothing.
I bent it a little more. Nothing. All the way. Nothing. I stood up for the first time in two weeks without crutches or a knee brace and was just …. ok. I couldn’t fully process what was happening, so I grabbed my crutches and my knee brace and walked away.
I had absolutely zero context for that kind of healing. In my world, your healing was either dramatically prayed for and dramatically celebrated or it was healing that came through the wisdom of doctors and nothing as strange as invisible hot oil.
Over the twenty or so years since that experience, I've had more moments like I had in the prayer chapel than I had in the dingy dorm common room. I think more of us are sitting in the ashes of unanswered prayers than stretching our legs under the sun of a miracle. No matter how valiantly we pray, death and loss still arrive at our doorstep and there’s nothing we do to undo it.
I’ve been battling my mental health for more than half of my life and God hasn’t healed me. This could very well be something that is a thorn in my flesh until the day I take my last breath, but let me tell you what it isn’t :
a lack of faith
discontentment
a sin issue
listening to demons
stress
motherhood
tiredness
Those are all things people have looked me in the eye and said and at different times, for different reasons, I believed them. I wanted it to be any one of those things because then I would have had some measure of control. If something tangible can be blamed, something tangible can be done. I can have more faith, I can learn to be content, I can stop sinning, stop listening to demons, reduce my stress, embrace my motherhood, and get more rest. Easy! Problem solved.
Except that my mental health issues, and most people’s mental health issues, aren’t spiritual or circumstantial problems. I’m not sure there are many people who would look at my fractured knee and say it only got that way because I didn’t have enough faith. Your mind is just as much a part of your physical body as anything else. A fractured mind is not a result of fractured faith.
The moment I stopped treating my struggles with my mind as spiritual issues, I got better.
I think the church has a major problem with addressing incredibly complex topics like mental health with sweeping strokes of spiritual simplicities. Just pray! Just read the Bible! Just XYZ or ABC. Instead of helping people find a path towards healing and relief, we heap shame and guilt on them and make the problem so much worse.
People run from Christian community because that community makes them feel broken and ashamed. If they were a good Christian, fully fulfilled in Christ, then they wouldn’t struggle. But they do, so they’re looked at as “not prayed up” or “putting their trust in men” or full of “strongholds.”
Or maybe … they have PTSD. Maybe the chemicals in their brain are unbalanced. Maybe, they have a condition that makes it difficult for their body to produce dopamine. Maybe their body lacks the ability to control their cortisol levels. Maybe they wake up every day and fight to be some semblance of a functional human being and what you see as “lacking faith” is them standing on more faith then the holiest of thous have in the tip of their smallest toe.
Maybe mental wellness isn’t a prerequisite for an abundant life in Christ.
I’m living proof of that.
I wake up every day and have a smoothie that is packed full of hormone balancing powders I pay $75/mo for. After breakfast, I take a supplement buffet of 8 pills to balance my hormones and help my body produce serotonin. I take insane levels of vitamin D and magnesium. I walk everyday. I sit on my porch and try to soak up as much sun as I can because my body doesn’t absorb vitamin d like everyone else’s. I journal my rage, my depression, and my fears. I spent years in therapy. I have stacks of books on neuroscience and emotional health on my shelf. I wake up and fight every. single. day. to function. Not even to function well all the time. Just to function. And the only reason I found all those tools and started to utilize them was because I finally stopped believing the lie that all of my problems were my personal spiritual fault.
I do all of those things and I resent that I have to but I’m glad that I’m able to because with all of that fight in me, my life is good. It’s manageable. It’s not fair, but it’s my cup and I’ll drink it until he heals me or calls me out. And for now, it’s good. And that’s a miracle in itself, I think.
You don’t need to wait to “get better” to step into the fullness of all that God has for you. Your worthiness isn’t on pause because you didn’t get out of bed today. You aren’t less of a person than the person who judges your emotional input and output. You’re held now. You’re loved now. You’re welcome now. You can live now.
Spiritual shame will keep you frozen and stuck in catastrophe. But God is love. And his love sets us free. That freedom might not mean we get a hot oil type of healing. But it does mean that Christ is in us and with us and around us no matter where the chaos is. We don’t have to bring our brokenness to him. He’s already in it because he’s in us. In him we live and move, right? That doesn’t change when our minds are not well—-just like it doesn’t change when our knees are fractured. Freedom isn’t in having the outcome you’ve prayed for, but in knowing you’re safe and loved no matter what.
You can accept the reality of your emotional and mental state while you hold on to hope that it doesn’t have to always be that way. You can dismiss the idea that it’s a spiritual problem while believing that it can have a spiritual solution. You can treat your struggles with whatever works for your body while also having deeply rooted faith.
You don’t have to live in the extremes of all or nothing. You don’t have to suffer while you wait for the supernatural. You can live a good life, even with a fractured mind.
Ask me how I know.
Maybe they wake up every day and fight to be some semblance of a functional human being and what you see as “lacking faith” is them standing on more faith then the holiest of thous have in the tip of their smallest toe.’ Tattoo this on my face pls.
I can remember pacing prior to a scheduled MRI in 1998 (hi, I'm old). With the symptoms I was having in addition to my "emotional-ness", the doctors thought that I either had a brain aneurysm or a chemical imbalance. I prayed fervently for an aneurysm. Can you even fathom that? But it would be easier to explain and for others to accept. Yeah, God didn't answer that one. It was a chemical imbalance.
I didn't grow up in church. God saved me in 1997, and for years I thought He messed up and got things backwards. Like, depression, salvation, and healing lines up better with the fairytale Christianity we like to tell ourselves. He didn't mess up. He got it right. He knew I'd need Him more than anyone else to walk this path. He introduced Himself first so I wouldn't be alone when others told me how faithless I was. God has only strengthened my faith through this thorn. I wish there were another way, but sometimes I don't. The intimacy grown in the wilderness with Him is like no other. He's kind like that.
Always so super grateful for your words, Kristen. I'm so proud of you. And I'm only adding my two cents in the hope it causes someone else to feel less alone.
Care to share your magnesium? I've been using one for some time, but I think my body has gotten used to it and needs a change.
You're the best!!!!