Preach Grace Until You Believe It: Depression and Mental Health.

I have a lot of thoughts about Robin Williams, and the response to Robin Williams’ death, and various ideas about depression and mental illness.

I was not planning on writing about any of these thoughts — and maybe not even sharing them — because I generally think there are enough people wiser or better informed than I, and I never want to be that person whose words cause harm, or add to the noise.

But tonight I had this clarity to share some thoughts, because there’s a chance others may need them, and while I cannot be responsible for all discourse and how it shapes people, I certainly am responsible if I have hope and do not share it. And I have great hope (but that is a post, and probably a book of many volumes, for another time).

While I have much I could say about Robin Williams, whose work I loved and whose attitude and ethos I greatly admired, I don’t know that I have enough of a grip on the situation and how I feel to write a cogent piece. (Me using the word “cogent” is the first sign.) I’ve been struggling with some physical infirmities that make even basic typing painful, as well as with overall pain that has made basic mental processes that were once easy for me very difficult. (I used to be able to think fast, as if I had constantly just had an espresso, and now, when the pain hits, I think slow, like I just woke up and will never see a cup of espresso ever again. It’s not only hard to function and write, but it’s also hard to realize I’m in one of those stages where everything is foggy, because I fully expect to be able to write, express myself, or do complex math at any time. However, I cannot.)

So, I haven't had the strength, energy, or will to write anything for months, but gosh, the Christians got me fired up tonight.

My brethren in Christ, as I’ll call them, have been my target before. I don’t seek this out or try to dismantle people or ideas that I know are under God’s sovereign control, but I’ve also seen great effects in my life when I pick through why some things in Christianity happen the way they do. These observations have helped me and some fellow Christians see the world in a way that moves us closer to living lives deep in the love of Jesus, and so I share them, even though I know I am picking on a behemoth of a body that is both flawed and good in many ways. As a final note, I’m not a super Christian, and I need all the help I can just to freaking look at Jesus, accept His love, and not live like a moron every day.

The first thing that caught my attention in the conversation that arose about depression and mental illness after Robin Williams’ death was the amount of people who urged others to get help if they were struggling. This is a usual thing — this outpouring of sympathy for all sufferers and offering aid the only way we know how. Attempts were made not only to help individuals but also to destigmatize an issue that is difficult to understand or talk about.

All the chatter looking to help, though, in some ways fueled the problems at the core of depression and mental illness — that people don’t know what’s going on and don’t know how to talk about it. This is not bad; trying is good. Learning is better.

A couple things that were said that stood out to me, and what I’ve learned: Telling people with mental illness or depression to "seek treatment" or "talk to someone — they want to listen" is maybe not the best terminology.

People who are struggling with depression or mental illness do not want to be told that what they are suffering from or dealing with is something that needs "treatment." They want to be addressed as a person. Calling it treatment pushes it into the arena where, if you admit you have dark thoughts, you feel that all you have ahead of you is a scary future that includes antidepressants, psych wards, and people not wanting to hire you for jobs. Conversely, telling someone to maybe “find someone who can help you” instead introduces them to a relationship where someone loves them or cares for them. That someone may be a doctor, and they may get treatment. But they’ll enter that world of getting help feeling like it’s something good they have done for themselves and the world, not that they’re an issue that must be neutralized or solved.

As for the other one — telling people to talk to someone, and assuring them that people will listen — is probably just naive. They’ve probably tried to talk to people. And they either couldn’t express what they were dealing with, the person they were talking to didn’t know how to help them (or, as often happens, just didn’t have the immense amount of time needed to listen to them, or was overwhelmed by an area outside their expertise, even if they could commiserate), or — as I often suspect — the people they tried to talk to haven’t listened to them or helped them, and that’s why the person is depressed in the first place. So many people who go through dark times do so because they feel alienated from people, and their attempts to close those gaps are met by people who implicitly or explicitly communicate that they need to clean up their crap before they can do life together. It creates a cycle where the worse a person feels, the less they can summon up the basic social skills needed to just be around other people, much less be a good friend. And let’s face it — when people are busy with life, they tend to weed out the people who carry too much “crazy,” who “just don’t make me feel better,” or who are a drain on their time or emotions. So it makes sense that depressed people aren’t talking to people — because people, normally and very understandably, don’t want to or don’t know how to talk to depressed people.

So, don’t assure people someone will listen to them. Instead, encourage the person to talk to someone with the goal of making a plan, even if it’s just a two-step plan, such as getting the person another trusted person they can talk to. That takes the pressure off the listener to relieve all the person’s need to be heard, and it takes the pressure off the person to not drive this listener away, too. It’s OK to admit that we all can’t help each other the way we’d like to, but we can help a struggling person find the next step even if we can’t help them right away ourselves.

That’s the docile part of this piece.

The real cranky showed up when I started reading not what well-meaning people were writing and posting about depression and mental health, but how Christians had decided to bless us with their knowledge.

I will pick on one I saw that I particularly did not like: A link to an article that explained that depression is not a disease — it’s a choice!

I did not read the article. I did not click through and see whether any of the points had merit. (My issue is not with the article’s content — it is about the attitude of people posting such an article.) I am simply going off the person who posted it and their comments in posting it, which were along the lines of “all this sadness and all this talk about mental illness, but people need to remember we can’t act like this is a disease because people just need to make better choices.”

There’s just so much crazy going on in my head right now that I’m not sure I can give a summary of the outrageousness of that kind of comment. There’s the obvious — the preachiness. There’s the ignorance — that [insert anything you want in here about how good intentions to raise your child are ultimately flawed, how the government is ruining this country by helping poor people, or how a story of God’s goodness in this world shouldn’t be supported because of someone’s lack of doctrinal integrity] because your personal beliefs on something don’t line up with this person’s ironclad view of a Word of God that’s actually very complex and nuance-oriented, they can say you’re just wrong and thinking of things incorrectly. There’s the arrogance — people are depressed, so let’s tell them how to think and see the world! There’s the shallowness — that there couldn’t be another way, another contributing factor, than just living right and perfectly all the time.

But I’m just going to shoot from the hip: Good job, Christians. Way to kick people when they’re down.

I've got a real beef with when tragedy happens, and Christians' first response is to critique however the secular world says to care for those people. This does not come across as helpful Christian advice. It comes across as attacking the people who are in the tragedy.

It does not matter if depression is a disease or not. Are people suffering? Are people shaken by what's just happened? Are they looking for deep answers?

I have yet to find any Christians who are experts in mental health, but I know plenty of Christians who should be experts in hope. Can we maybe use what we know about the Bible to strengthen people and lift them up in this time instead of crapping on how they're trying to make sense of it?

I mean, for God's sake, how on earth are people supposed to get to the truth unless we tell them? Sitting there and picking on whether depression is a disease or not is not only foolish and a waste of time, but it makes us look like snotty rear ends.

Hooray! We know something scientific! And meanwhile, the entire world is swirling around in sin and hopelessness, and we're critiquing one link in the mighty chains that ensnare us all.

You know, maybe depressed people are depressed because all the Christians are posting on Facebook and not taking time to listen to them or love them or learn what it's like to feel like there really, really is no hope. They may have gotten to that place because they were told once that their feelings were a choice, and if they kept feeling that way, they were wrong. Then, those feelings continued — for whatever reason, whether it be prolonged grief (normal for any person), physical imbalances (pretty real and documented for making normal "down" feelings get increasingly worse and create a snowball effect biologically), or even what we can call "sinful choices," just to throw you folks a bone — and they had nowhere to go, because all they knew was that they were wrong to feel that way. Probably wrong to just be, too.

Don't tell the Christians, but we're all wrong. It's called sin. And you know what? God knows about it. He even knows whether these people who say they're depressed or mentally ill are making bad choices or not. He knows whether they should "get their act together" or whether they're "allowed to feel that way." He knows whether they’re in sin and why they can’t just make the choice to get out of it. He knows that even if depression or mental illness is not a disease that slowly kills you, people in that situation do not feel they can make choices to get out of it (especially if they’ve already tried) — they feel controlled by it.

And, while I would love to sit here and debate the merits of all of this, disease vs. choice, my basic Christianity has taught me this: God's grace covers it all.

GOD'S GRACE COVERS IT ALL.

God's grace covers the people who can't keep their crap together and make the "choice" of not being depressed. God's grace covers the people for whom it may be a disease. While we're on it, God's grace covers all the people who are messed up and just can't stop sinning. His grace covers the people who are addicted to anything — yes, drugs, alcohol, women, men, but also work, approval, money, food, and any other form of self, self, self.

So why does it matter that we diagnose the sin or the root of the sin if God’s grace covers it all?

Shouldn't we just be helping people get to the doctor and know that they're not only allowed to be forgiven, but are forgiven?

(The only unpardonable sin is believing you can’t be forgiven, a key belief for many with mental health concerns.)

There’s a liberating way to tell these people that life — in any form, not just depression — is a choice, but it’s by driving them to the choice of grace, not picking a petty fight with one of the few caring communities that is trying to figure out how the heck to treat all these down people. Sure, depression is a choice. So is everyone’s pet sin, and following God. Knowing they’re choices you should make doesn’t make them any easier to make. And if people start treating depression like a disease — well, maybe they’ll fly through treatments until they get to the only one that works. (Terming it a disease does not mean releasing people from culpability. It does not have to be regarded as controlling, and certainly not terminal (a fear some people have, thinking that leads to suicide). Calling it a disease also opens people to taking steps to fight it, such as good ... choices.)

For those who still disagree, who say it is important that we clarify these things and make sure that people aren't thinking incorrectly about things that are sin and are choices that people should make, to make sure everyone acts right, I think it is very nice that you find grace so dangerous that we must make sure people come to the throne of grace appropriately. If we start letting anything go, after all, the kids will misbehave. People will sin. People may realize that all their crutches and attempts to be OK don't work, and they need something more than themselves.

What will we do if the humans — the good, Christian humans — aren't in control anymore and sin is just running rampant, with God's grace running rampant behind it?

That's a good question. I guess it depends on whether Christians can fulfill their real duty and help those people swallowed up by sin — help them toward grace. That's how they find it, you know. Sin helps the schoolteacher of the law point people to their need for a Savior, but it is our job to explain that there indeed is a Savior. If it’s a choice, someone has to be there to help those people make the choice (or even know of it), and you usually don’t get close to people by telling them that if they just made better decisions, they’d be fine.

We’ve all had times when we haven’t exactly been the love of Jesus to people and instead just told them to get it together — or, the more common, explained and prescribed acts that come after salvation and a changed heart to people who still aren’t in touch with the love of God or what that love really means in their lives. It’s hard to know what to say and when, but sensitivity — and listening instead of telling people to act — has strong echoes of Jesus.

Whether Robin Williams died of a disease he couldn’t control or made a poor choice is an issue I don’t think many Christians will disagree on. The Bible is clear about our freedom and the great choice all people must make. It’s also clear, however, that the way Christians lead people to knowledge of such freedom and choice is not through preying on suffering and correcting (unsaved) people’s thought processes. It’s by showing them the love of God and telling them of His saving grace — introducing them to a higher affection. What He does with their beliefs after that is up to Him.

If you're maybe feeling that you spent some of your time assessing people instead of pointing them to God with the love that God has shown you, don't worry: Grace covers it all. Even those whose attempts at dispensing truth could have come off more lovingly.

God's grace covers those sinners — and He probably covers the depressed, too.



Links worth considering:
"What the Church, Christians Need to Know About Suicide, Mental Health"
Russell Brand on Robin Williams
Anne Lamott on Robin Williams

There Really Is a Tree.

Very rarely do you get to write for work the things you consider most worth writing about. Here's something I wrote that just scratches the surface of meaning.

412.

I’ve always loved numbers. When I was a kid, I would borrow the Money section from my dad’s USA Today and add up lines upon lines of stock quotes. I loved played Monopoly, I was great in math class, and the back of baseball cards were better than the front.

Digital clocks were one of my favorites. I had all sorts of games I would play whenever I saw time displayed. One is to “cast out nines,” which is a trick you use when checking division problems. Basically, when all the numbers add up to nine, they cancel each other out. So, 4:50 was an even one, as was 8:01 or 2:34.

I would also count the lines that made up each glowing number, and I knew which times of day had the perfect number of lines to make up perfect 8s with no spaces wasted. 3:18. 8:47. 2:34 (again!).

Now that you know I’m crazy, let’s move on to those glorious times in life when certain numbers gain a special meaning. It may be your birthday — seeing 10 and 31 anywhere makes me smile, because Halloween is when I was born. I’ve always liked 21 (the first day of winter, and the first of summer — and the day my grandmother was born), and 3 and 7 always worked out for me, probably because I was raised reading the Bible.

In high school, 24 became my lifelong favorite number. It was the jersey number of my hero, and the number I wore when I played basketball. I would forever use it for passwords or pins.

But the newest number for me has been 412 (a variation of 24, mind you). This number popped up sometime when I was working a sad job at a sad newspaper. At first, I couldn’t place it, but I was seeing it everywhere.

I was supposed to be at work at 4:00, but I usually rolled in around 4:12 (which, technically, was 4:07 because my clock was five minutes fast). When I went to bed, it was often 4:12, too, the time I finally unwound from a long day at work.

Whenever I saw 412, it gave me hope. It seemed to say that God was there, and that He was keeping track of me, and that even in the mess, there was a sign. It was my snake in the wilderness, my fleece in the dew, my raven by the stream.

The number 412 soon got an unfortunate cousin in the number 146, which was the “tube number” of a very inept coworker of mine. (We used a DOS-based editing system, and each station was assigned a number. Mine was 245. His was 146. When you saw 146 pop up when you tried to get into a story, you groaned. When you saw an article that originated at 146, you groaned. Eventually, when you saw 146 anywhere, you groaned.)

God gave me a lot of 412s at that job, but I also got a lot of 146s. No matter how many time I saw 146, though — often waking up in the middle of the day after my night shift (1:46), there was a 412 when I rolled into work.

For every 146, there’s a 412.

I wrote that on a piece of paper and hung it in my cube, and no one had a clue what it meant but me. I knew, though. I knew every time I saw those numbers, and I knew it when 146 walked over with one of those things he always did and jumbled my day.

For every 146, there’s a 412. It works in math, and it works with God — except, maybe, during the times when God is so amazing that He lets you see 412 more than you see 146, even if there’s an equal amount out there. (I haven’t seen a lot of 146s since I left that job.)

The cool thing about these numbers popping out and surprising you is that it often happens when you aren’t expecting it, and that’s what makes me say it’s from God. I’ll be having a crappy day and will be praying that He’ll show Himself to me, and all of the sudden my savings on a grocery receipt will be $4.12. I’ll be muddling through a day at work, and then I’ll see it’s April 12 (4/12). I don’t go to work at 4:00 anymore, and I don’t go to bed at 4 a.m., but I still see so many 412s.

(I realized later that the place where I probably picked up “412” was from a Switchfoot song called that. And, yep, the words describe my life around the time of 412 perfectly.)

I was working on my checkbook tonight, thanking God for the three-paycheck month yet wondering how I was going to pay my car insurance and my rent and that credit card bill that just keeps getting bigger. I had enough to cover it this time, but the margins keep getting thinner.

Last week in church, my pastor had talked about a tithing challenge. Apparently, some people who weren’t raised in repressive Judeo-Christian households haven’t had the 10% rule drilled into them, and they need to be reminded to give their firstfruits, and a full tenth, to the local church God has placed in their lives. (Just kidding. I’m aware this is a complex topic, but I couldn’t resist.)

I’ve always tithed, although sometimes I didn’t have a local church, or I had to move money around. Recently, though, I’ve been in a pickle. I stopped tithing to my local church for several months this past year because my work schedule changed, and I worked every Sunday. I was also feeling disconnected from the church in many ways, so I had welcomed the schedule change as a way to take a break and reassess. Since I was not actively involved in the church, I did not consider it my local church, and I instead invested my tithe money in some missionaries I already supported otherwise who were dealing with a shortfall on their monthly support.

When I returned to the church this spring, I started tithing again — but not 10% to the church. I didn’t really know what to do, in fact. I wasn’t going to cut back on the missionaries; I had prayed and asked God to keep providing enough that I could give them this extra amount. But I also couldn’t afford to tithe 10% to my church, because the amount I was giving to the missionaries was already about that much of my salary.

If I tithed and kept my promise, I would be giving away 20% of what I earn, right off the bat. And I’m in a living situation where my rent is about 60% of what I earn. I would prefer to still be able to buy food.

But then the pastor got up and talked about tithing, and the challenge, and I knew what was right. It’s just money. I don’t need new clothes, and I haven’t spent anything on myself in forever (and I don’t really intend to, if it’s between spending on me or God). This means no more eating out for lunch, or not letting my car break down, or skipping some things I would like. But it’s just money. And, as the great C.S. Lewis says, you’re not really giving if it doesn’t hurt in some way.

So tonight, thanking God for my three-paycheck month, which took care of the old car insurance, I added in this week’s deposit and went to write my check for my church. I totaled up how much I made and cut off the last digit. I wrote the check for what is a very big chunk of change for me.

And then, as I ripped off the boring, cheapest-you-can-buy check, I saw the number: 412.

Of course my step of faith would be written on the 412th check I had ever written from this account. Of course it would be when I was asking God whether He would really hold me together through this. Of course He would open the door for me to give a 412 when there wasn’t a 146 in sight.

I once used my 412/146 thought in a song I wrote, the theme of which was grace. The main line to that song, in which I tried to capture the incredible feeling I had one night when I realized something God had done just for me, was, “I didn’t need it but You gave it anyway. I need to remember that.”

I have trouble remembering sometimes. But that’s why God made clocks, and numbers like 412.

Preach Grace Until You Believe It: The 99.

The difference between Lucifer and Michael is attitude, and perspective, and choice. They both believe the same things, but one accepts that truth.

One of my Bible professors once used the metaphor of a man on a ship to explain grace. The man was on a cruise where fancy meals were served in beautiful dining rooms. But he, being poor, stayed down in steerage and ate moldy bread he had brought with him. Near the end of the trip, he found out that the nice meals were free of charge — they were included in the fare — and he’d been eating the moldy bread for no reason.

I hated that story for two reasons: One, that stinks. Two, I know what it’s like to eat the moldy bread — to miss out on God’s free grace — and I hate to hear about it. But I especially hate to be told that it is essentially my fault that I wasn’t upstairs. How was I supposed to know? When I tried to leave my bread and go up, why did I feel regret and turmoil?

And why, Bible professor, do your lessons about grace always make me feel so unwanted and unable to access said grace? Why do they make me feel that something in my power is what’s keeping me from going upstairs? Real grace is from a God Who comes into the galleys and pounds on the doors until we leave our mold and follow Him. But we are often taught instead that He is a captain holding His caviar aloft with a tiny fork, waiting for us to wake up and shaking His head when we don’t.

I have often waded through the guilt from this approach, and my conclusion now is that grace, for us, is less about grace and more about the mental and emotional hurdles that keep us from it. Whether we don’t believe it’s true, believe that we can’t have it, or believe that the God behind it actually wants something from us in a sinister way, we fight it. It’s not banquets or moldy bread — it’s childhood heartache, legalism, broken relationships, or the waste of the world. These things tell us that, even if grace is real, it’s not there for someone like us.

I’ve often heard Christians who come from works-oriented backgrounds (read: poor understandings of grace) say that they are “one of the 99.” This refers to the parable where Jesus leaves all else behind and chases one lost sheep. When that soul is found and returned, the rest of Heaven — presumably including the 99 — rejoice.

The bitter Christians say they are one of the 99 — one of the good ones who lived “correctly” and never got to see the real love and grace of God because they were minding their business and doing right while He chased the bad ones. They lament not being able to experience God fully, and that them being too spiritually aligned has ruined their relationship with God to some end.

But the catch here is that these types of people aren’t one of the 99. They can’t be.

The real 99 understand grace. The 99 are in love with God. The 99 are the ones who get it and can’t help but be thrilled when another comes over — because they know that they themselves didn’t climb to Heaven. They, too, were carried in at some point, just like No. 100 is being embraced on his or her way through the door.

These Christians who think they are “one of the 99" are likely far worse. Far from being right with God, they have the most polluted view of their Savior. They know what truth is, but their actions question the basics of Who God says He is.

They’re outside the fold, or down in the basement of the ship, and they’re not coming in or up. They’re focused on whatever grieves them so — whatever lifestyle they feel bound to live to “please God” — and, because they’re so focused, they have little chance of seeing the God waiting patiently behind them, or knocking on the door, or holding the giant billboard telling them that the only thing keeping them from grace is themselves.

That makes the faux 99 the most bitter of all, because not only are they outside of the grace, as they thought, but they’re not pleasing God via another route, as they thought, either. He doesn’t want whatever they’re doing. He wants them to have His grace. But they’re so handicapped that they misunderstand grace to the extent that they don’t even know how to accept it.

These 99 are actually the one — but they’re the one whose head is still in the brambles, whose Shepherd is still waiting.

The difference between the 99, and the one, and the ones who are yet to become the one, is just one thing: acceptance. Do you accept that grace is what God says it is — wonderful, free, waiting to be given — or do you insist on making it whatever you have twisted it to be? Do you hate it for the mangled ways you’ve seen it in your life, or do you choose to believe what God says it is?

The difference between Lucifer and Michael is not what both know to be true. They both know Who God is. They don’t argue with His love and mercy. The difference is that one accepts, and believes, and acquiesces to God’s will. The other will fight it and hate it forever, no matter how badly it ends. Grace requires only the submission of one’s will, but for some, that is too much.

What turns us from the sheep whose head is stuck in a bush, or a person stuck eating moldy bread, is the same. We so desperately want the right, but we’re so desperately twisted in our attempts that we must be stopped. We have to be kept from trying, through our efforts, to access grace. We must be prevented from bleating our views so loudly that we can’t hear God’s. We must be rescued, pulled away, by a loving God. We won’t ever know to go upstairs — or know that we’re living or merely toiling outside the fold — unless Someone literally saves us.

The moral of the story is not the stupidity of the sheep, or the haplessness of the sea traveler. It’s also not how much we don’t want to be the servant in the parable of the talents, who thinks badly of his master and hides the blessing he was given, even though he knows he should be a thankful, joyful go-getter. It’s not how much we’re the nine who walked away when only one came back to thank Christ, and it’s not how we’re eternally the older brother, either. These, again, focus on us, and how we have always felt inadequate to change our hearts.

The point is that, even if we’ve only once been these people (and we all have, a hundred times over), we have thus fulfilled the one requirement for grace. Christ didn’t come to save the perfect, and those of us who in some way think we have done any good, and especially enough good that we’re somehow out of the reach of God’s full grace — well, we are the most lost of all.

Whether it be someone who has never found God’s grace, or those who know it and call themselves Christians but feel that grace has evaded them on a daily level, we all stand to be rescued again.

Call yourself the Lucifer, and say you’re one of the 99.  Stay downstairs, paralyzed by the supposed middle ground. Know you’re unthankful, and unknowing of what to do with God’s greatest gifts.

Then turn around. You are not in a catch-22. You are not living in a world of regret, where you could somehow keep yourself eating moldy bread and miss out on the banquet of God’s grace. You’re not the vengeful servant, and you’re not one of the nine that walked away.

Because, if you’ve turned and looked behind you, you’ll have done the one thing required to find grace. You’ll have stopped looking at yourself, and you’ll be looking at God instead. He is the point of all this, after all — not the sheep, not the passengers. Now, accept.