Time for a Nervous Breakdown

The following is taken from an article entitled, "Impossible God".

I have spoken with a number of believers lately who have been searching the Scriptures for answers to personal, often devastating, problems and feel they are finding no answers. At least they are honest enough to admit their discouragement. It’s not considered “appropriate” for Christians to acknowledge disappointment with God. In some circles it’s probably considered blasphemous. But like the father of the demonized child who cried to the Lord in Mark 9:24, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. . .!”, acknowledging our weakness will do more to touch our Savior’s heart than pretending we don’t have any weaknesses to acknowledge. Do we think God is surprised by our feelings and failings? Even more importantly, do we believe that God is somehow disappointed in us for being disappointed in Him? If we do, we don’t understand “Grace” – we may not yet have seen the real heart of God.

I want to share a story about a man, Joseph Cooke, whose misunderstanding of God’s nature took him to a place real Christians aren’t supposed to go – a nervous breakdown. He writes,

“Such a thing isn’t supposed to happen to a good Christian, much less a missionary as I was. But it did happen. And I had to leave Thailand a failed missionary, no longer able to preach or teach, hardly able to pray or read my Bible, hateful to myself, a burden to my wife and useless to God and man.

“What went wrong?”

“Deep down in my heart I was living day by day with a nongracious God. I believed He was gracious, but this belief focused on beginning and ending; that is, when I first became a Christian there was plenty of grace; I had come to God with empty hands, and God had welcomed me. No price tag. No strings attached. Sheer unconditional love.

“Then at the end of the line there, too, was plenty of grace; I knew I was free from the terror of the coming judgment; my name was written in the Lamb’s book of life; and I recognized this as a gift I hadn’t earned.

“In between, however, life was one long deadly grind of trying to be perfect to earn the daily pleasure of a God Who simply could not be pleased. His demands were so high and His opinion of me so low, that there was no way I could really live under anything but His frown. I found I had to keep scrubbing myself in God’s bathtub.

“Another character of my self-invented nongracious God was His nagging. I don’t know whether you’ve ever lived with someone who nagged, but if you have you know what it feels like. They nag you about how you eat and dress. They fuss about how you walk and how you spend your time. They’re constantly on you to do this and not do that. And it doesn’t matter how hard you try, it’s never good enough.

“Imagine living with a God like that. All day long it was, ‘Why don’t you pray more? Why don’t you spend more time in the Word? Why don’t you witness? When will you ever learn self-discipline? How can you allow yourself to indulge such evil thoughts? Do this! Don’t do that! On and on and on. And there’s no place to hide!

“I had a God Who really, deep down underneath, considered me to be less than dirt. Oh, He made a great to-do about loving me enough to die for me. But I believed the day-to-day love and acceptance I longed for could only be mine if I’d let Him crush nearly everything that was really me. When you came right down to it, there was scarcely a word, feeling, decision, motive or thought of mine that God liked.

“The fact was, I knew very little about the God of the Bible – the God Paul tells us about and the One Jesus came to reveal. I had hardly met the God Who deeply cherished me and Who longed to free me to be a mature son and heir.

“I was living with a non-gracious God. And that’s what finally brought me down to the disintegration, pain and hopelessness of an emotional breakdown. There was no healing for me until I began to discover, or rediscover, a different kind of God – GOD AS HE REALLY IS – not as my distorted attitudes made Him out to be.

“In time my heart began to sense and trust the grace of the God my mind had long believed in. I had to accept God’s acceptance. And I had to accept myself in the same way God was accepting me. Not that I was content with the things that were wrong, but that these things could only be set right if I started from the grace ground of God’s unconditional love for me; I had to keep reaffirming my trust in God’s love even when I failed or was discouraged, when other people’s opinions and expectations pressed upon em, when I faced heavy responsibility, when my deepest relationships went sour, and when I hungered and thirsted for righteousness. Over and over again I have had to keep reminding myself that God’s love meets me here, not because of what I deserve, but because of His grace.

“For God IS gracious – more gracious than my most exalted thoughts or wildest dreams.”

My prayer for the “Grace” family, is that the real Jesus will become real to us – that we will see Him AS HE IS and allow the wonder of that seeing capture our hearts and minds.