understanding – Page 158 – Broken Believers

Upgrading to Joy

by Julie Anne Fidler, BB Weekly Contributor

I don’t know about you, but when I’m feeling ill – particularly with depression – I don’t want to do anything. Getting out of bed is a chore, tackling business or housework is excruciating, and when it’s all over we are twice as exhausted as we were when we started. Church seems out of the question. Reading the Bible seems impossible. Joy is a far-away star hurtling through the cosmos that you can’t grasp and reign in. Your world shuts down and you have no desire to grant access to anyone or anything. Sadness is a great isolator.

One of my favorite websites is www.dictionary.com (a writer’s best friend!) It defines joy as “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying.” The primary words here are “caused by.” We don’t always feel joy. Heck, nobody does. But if you battle mental illness, that statement is especially true. Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy and he uses our brain chemistry to do so. He’s so, so good at stealing our joy. But knowing that joy is caused by something should give us a lot of hope!

Maybe the Enemy can snatch our joy, but we can snatch it back. How do we do that? We decide to go against our feelings of despair and exhaustion and pursue it. Job’s suffering makes ours seem almost laughable by comparison and yet even he was able to find the cause of joy and run to it.

“let their flesh be renewed like a child’s;
   let them be restored as in the days of their youth’—
²⁶ then that person can pray to God and find favor with him,
   they will see God’s face and shout for joy;
   he will restore them to full well-being.
²⁷ And they will go to others and say,
   ‘I have sinned, I have perverted what is right,
   but I did not get what I deserved.”

-Job 33:25-27

Job, a man who lost everything and was abandoned by everyone he ever cared for, understood what unlocks joy, and that was God himself. Jesus, of course, understood the same concept.

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” –John 16:24

During a very dark period in my life, I started visiting my current church with friends who were already members there. My church is a rather Pentecostal church (no snake-handling or anything crazy like that, I promise) and at the time I was visiting, I was a member of a much more subdued church. I was in so much emotional pain that I opted out of worship altogether. I sat in my seat and cried as others raised their hands and shouted praise and I wondered how they could be so happy when we live in a world that is so cold.

But a funny thing happened as I sat there in tears – the little layer of ice around my heart began to melt. I wasn’t on my feet dancing, but I felt warm peace seep into the frigid hopelessness. I had found a tiny bit of joy, CAUSED by getting out of bed, getting dressed, and sitting in that church pew.

Say the word “joy” and two different pictures come to mind. In the first image, I see someone jumping up and down, pumping their fist in the air, shouting praise to God. In the second image, I see someone quiet and reserved, eyes closed, a tiny, peaceful smile on their lips. I believe that both of these images apply to us. Sometimes joy is all-consuming and we can’t help but shout. Other times, joy is a quiet whisper of hope in our ear, a flicker of happiness that says “take heart, God loves you.”

And I am learning that if we have no joy, whether it’s because we’re suffering a rough bout with our disease or because life is just hard in general, it’s because we’re not close enough to the cause of joy. Often, our minds say there is no hope or joy in this world, so we have to make a decision – are we going to listen to our messed-up emotions, or live by fact, which translates into walking by faith? If we want joy, we have find it.

One of the associate pastors at my church once said something that stuck with me. He said, “I want to be under the spout where the stuff of Heaven comes out.” It may be a little bit cheesy but it’s true. Corporate worship, quiet time alone with God, reading the Word, private worship and surrounding ourselves with people who compliment and encourage our faith are all “the stuff of Heaven” that cause joy. We have to get to the spout.

If you feel the walls closing in around you today, deny your pain, get up, and go find joy. The joy of the Lord is so powerful that a tiny drop is more than enough, I challenge you today to believe for an outpouring of it. Get up and get under that spout.

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Julie Anne Fidler is a contributing writer for Brokenbelievers.com. She comes with a humble and understanding heart for those with a mental illness. Her writing gift is valued greatly. Look for her post weekly, on this blog.

She keeps a personal ministry blog at www.mymentalhealthday.blogspot.com. Read more there.

Julie–From the Heart

by Julie Anne Fidler, Contributor to BB

I accepted Christ as my Savior the day before my thirteenth birthday on May 4, 1992. Some people get saved and don’t feel any different than they did in the moments before they said the ‘Sinner’s Prayer‘, but I sensed that my decision was a huge one. I walked around for the next several months in a state of giddiness not unlike what I experienced on Christmas Eve or the night before my big birthday party. My parents enrolled me in a Jewish day camp that summer where I taught swimming to younger children and the staff and campers were kind enough to endure my ‘Jesus t-shirts’, Amy Grant music, and talk of salvation without objection.

I knew nothing about theology, having only gone to church a small handful of times in my life. I read the Bible verses given to me by the woman who said the Sinner’s Prayer with me. Most of them were about God answering prayer and how all we needed to do was ask Him for what we wanted, and believe He would give it to us. At thirteen years old, it seemed like a pretty good theology to me. I went about my life believing that God was a giant vending machine in the sky; just put your wish in the slot, and out comes your answered prayer!

Although I had wrestled with depression as a young child, it didn’t really hit me full-force until the eighth grade. I had been sexually abused by a family friend until I was eleven years old, and my family was troubled. I had reason to be depressed, but that was the year that my depression became so overwhelming that I wasn’t sure I wanted to live life anymore. The hopelessness and despair only worsened as I made my way through high school, a very brief stint in college, and eventually married life.

I have met countless people who credit their faith with getting them through the darkest times in their lives. I credit my faith for the same thing, only, for me, it wasn’t quite so simple. My faith gave me hope to carry on at times, and confused me to no end at others. I was a Christian, but I was not experiencing joy. I was experiencing crushing sadness, wondering how other Christians could be so happy. I knew the difference between right and wrong. I knew what sin was, and I knew that sin tempted even the best Christians. What I didn’t grasp was why I desperately wanted to do the right things, why I wanted to have a rich relationship with God, but I was so drawn to self-destruction at every turn.

Somewhere in my late teens or early twenties, I had convinced myself that I simply wasn’t holy enough. I was a bad person who didn’t want God enough. I was somehow spiritually flawed, I decided. I questioned the validity of my own salvation. I concluded that someone who really knew Jesus wouldn’t be so miserable or confused all the time.

When I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder at twenty-three years old, it was in a last-ditch effort to figure out if my problems really were the result of spiritual deficit. I felt like a failure for having to take medication. But after my diagnosis, I started looking back on my old journals to track how far back my problems went. As I read through hopeless page after hopeless page, I began to see a pattern emerge – periods of days or weeks when I felt on fire for God, followed by weeks or days of being too depressed to make the effort. I began to realize that my walk with God had always followed the patterns of my cycles.

I went through many medications before I finally found Seroquel in 2006. Seroquel all but wiped out my rages and helped me sleep. One beautiful Saturday morning in May of 2006, as I sat beside my husband watching my nephew play his Little League game, I looked around at the budding trees and realized I had joy for the first time in recent memory. The longer I took my meds, the easier my walk with God became.

I worked for a good friend of mine several years ago at a ministry for mentally ill adults. He was well aware of my issues, and I told him how hard it was to follow God when all I wanted to do was hurt myself, or sleep for weeks at a time. He told me, “God will not judge you for what goes on in your bipolar brain.” I don’t know what to make of that theology, whether I agree with it or not. But I got the point – God understands our pain and knows that we have limits.

But does that mean we can just dismiss God when we feel crappy?

The older I get, the more I begin to realized that God will not judge us for being tempted, or for feeling a certain way. Jesus was tempted and He felt everything that you and I feel today. It’s what we do with those things that matter. I have a mental illness, but I still have choices. I can choose to go to church and worship God when I’d rather sleep in and cry all Sunday. I can reach out to a friend for support instead of becoming a hermit until the sun shines again. I can read my Bible instead of wallowing in misery.

What my misfiring brain tells me to do and what I CHOOSE to do are often two different things.

We must choose to seek God when everything in us would rather be sick, lonely, and alone. I realize that some people have very severe mental illness and truly cannot choose these things. But for those of you who are like me – we still have options, and we need to exercise them.

We can’t always choose our circumstances, but even in our sickness, we can choose how we respond to them, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Julie Anne Fidler is now a contributing writer for Brokenbelievers.com. She comes with a humble and understanding heart for those with a mental illness. Her writing gift is valued greatly. Look for her post weekly, on this blog.

She keeps a personal ministry blog at mymentalhealthday.blogspot.com. Read more there.

Close Encounters of the God Kind

by Julie Anne Fidler, Contributor to BB

As odd as it may sound, being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder was one of the highlights of my life. I got good and excited about it in the same way one might get good and excited about discovering they were pregnant. But at 24 years old, I had lost jobs, lost friends, my young marriage was on the brink of divorce, and my faith was in tatters. I sought help when there was nothing left to lose. A diagnosis meant that all the craziness in my life had a real name and that craziness could be treated.

With three suicide attempts and a history of poor decision-making under my belt, I believed that my main problem was a basic lack of faith. I spent a huge chunk of my life seeking spiritual guidance and counseling and always felt like if I could just “make a go” of my walk with God, all of my problems would subside. Except that I couldn’t make a go of it. My faith followed the same pattern as the rest of my life – for a few days or weeks I was on fire for the Lord, followed by a period of deep despair and doubt, eventually leading to apathy. I tried to be a good Christian girl but over and over again, the same pattern emerged.

Hoping and believing that treatment for my BP would help me get this part of my life on track, I eagerly told my friends, family, and other church members of the recent development. I was not surprised when my parents didn’t share my elation. They are from a different era. You simply didn’t discuss things like that. I was, however, hurt and angered to get the same reaction from other believers.

Yes, everyone meant well. They asked me if I was spending time in prayer, reading the Word faithfully, and fellowshipping and much as possible. Those are not at all bad or wrong questions to ask. They are the questions we are supposed to be asking our brothers and sisters in Christ on a regular basis, under the most normal circumstances. But with many of these people, their tone and incessant questioning made it clear that they didn’t believe in mental illness, only spiritual deficit. A few even came right out and said so.

While my quality time with Jesus improved and deepened, I began to find myself consistently held back by one thing: anger. I was angry at the church. I was angry that people accepted that I needed insulin for my diabetes, but they didn’t want to accept that I needed medication for BP. I found myself backing away from these people and for a time I even stopped attending church. I even shut out the people who had been understanding and supportive, fearing they were only telling me what I wanted to hear. When people offered to pray that God would release me from the grip of my illness, I became offended. I wanted these people to understand that I had not erected some sort of spiritual wall that kept me locked into depression or mania.

Months went by before I returned to church. I only went because my niece was with me and I wanted to be a pseudo-role model to her. The sermon that morning was about healing, and though I can’t recall all the details of what Pastor Barry said, I can tell you the message I heard loud and clear: I HAD, indeed, erected a spiritual wall between God and I.

In my anger and defensiveness, I’d pushed aside the omnipotence of God. I had forgotten that He is still holy, that He is still in control, that He is still the great physician. I had placed all of my faith in the medications I took every day, and in the human physicians who prescribed them to me. If God had healed a blind man right in front of me, I would have missed it because I was too angry to stop and watch Him work. I also began to realize that if God can reach out and heal it, then it must be a spiritual issue. Isn’t everything? I wanted acceptance and understanding for my condition, but I became a Pharisee in the process, dismissing the faith of others who believed that by merely touching the hem of Jesus’ robe, healing was possible.

There is no doubt that the church needs to be educated on mental illness. There is no doubt that mental illness (I believe “brain illness” is a more accurate term) exists and is a true, medical condition. There is also no doubt that the Enemy is using mental illness to divide and conquer, and shred the hopes of people like me, who just want to be as normal a person as possible. Once the fog of my anger cleared, God showed me that I was to be a part of the solution to this… but it could never happen until I was willing to be sympathetic towards those who don’t understand, instead of bitter.

If you’re reading this, you’re a part of the grand plan, too. It’s a tough road, but you should feel honored. There is nothing more satisfying or powerful than turning one of Satan’s own weapons against him.

Julie Anne Fidler is now a contributing writer for Brokenbelievers.com. She comes with a humble and understanding heart for those with a mental illness. Her writing gift is valued greatly. Look for her post weekly, on this blog.

She keeps a personal ministry blog at mymentalhealthday.blogspot.com. Read more there.

2010 Links, Favorites

Below you will find internet links. I have gathered these up, finding them useful, entertaining and a blessing. Some of these are mental illness links, others quote links. Some are quite general, and others much more specific. There are also a few Bible study aids, and these are quite valuable as ‘good ones’ are hard to find.

I am sorry that they are just laid out like this, but to categorize them would be difficult. My apologies. I realize that this pretty raw, but I hope you’ll be able to ‘mine’ something out of them. I skimmed through and left a comment on some the url’s. Handling some of these may require some patience.

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http://www.biblegateway.com/, perhaps the best Bible/versions

http://www.thegracetabernacle.org/quotes/gracequotes.html

http://bipolar.alltop.com/

http://www.dbsalliance.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_publications

http://newstracts.org/christiansites.html, great collection

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/imonk-101-when-i-am-weak-why-we-must-embrace-our-brokenness-and-never-be-good-christians, the Monk is always good, this is one of my personal favs

http://www.gotquestions.org/, hundreds of questions, good site

http://www.moodyradio.org/brd_AudioMin.aspx?id=13144, interesting, and Moody as a rule is solid

http://www.preceptaustin.org/, good site, but take your time with it.

http://net.bible.org/home.php

http://www.roundtripmissions.com/, planning STM trip?