Mental Health and the BibleSample

Mental Health Struggles Are Not Random

I’ll repeat something I said in yesterday’s devotional: mental health is not a barometer of Christian maturity or faith. You can be a faithful Christian and still struggle with your mental health. I want to encourage you to take the power and resources available to you to do more than struggle with your mental health. I want you to thrive. And one step towards moving from struggling to thriving is getting to the root of your mental health struggles. As the Psalmist asks in Psalm 43:5, “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” We can do the same by questioning what is leading to our mental health challenges.

See, when we have negative, painful, or even traumatic experiences, such as being bullied, rejected, or experiencing embarrassment, we begin to believe lies from those experiences. Lies like “I’m never safe”, “I will be rejected”, or “I’m unlovable”. Anything in the present that looks or feels like those past painful experiences can bring with it all of the emotions and lies. For example, as an adult, if you are having a conflict with a friend, you may start becoming anxious because, at a deeper level, you fear rejection. In this situation, your fight or flight system is activated, and your brain is trying to protect you from what it perceives as a threat due to past rejection.

Maybe growing up, you had experiences of not being able to meet the expectations or approval of others. Now, circumstances come up–a challenging task, a poor performance review at work, others having skillsets you don’t–and at times, you grow depressed. You feel hopeless about your ability to overcome the challenge or situation.

Over time, the neurons in our brain that fire together wire together. This means that as we think the same thoughts, believe the same beliefs, and respond the same way to situations, our brains create fixed patterns of thinking and responding, making it easier and easier to repeat those same patterns again.

But just as our mental health struggles are not random, our healing is not random. The good news is that God can heal our pain, our brains can rewire, and we can overcome the lies we believe.

Worth mentioning, too, is that modern medicine is a gift from God. Medication can help reduce symptoms as you work through the deeper, complex issues that are driving mental health challenges. Consulting an informed psychiatrist about this can be a great step to take as well.

Thought of the Day: My mental health struggles are not random; they’re symptoms of deeper pain God wants to heal, lies to rewrite, and patterns God can help me break.