What I remember most was the fluorescent lights.
They refused to dim or turn off and they cast a strange pale blue onto every
surface, making the already surreal scene that much more discomforting for me.
In the corner, dressed in hospital scrubs, was a young man who was in charge of
a campus ministry at the college I was working for at the time. His long hair
was falling in front of his face and as I scanned his body, slumped in the
corner of the padded cell, I couldn’t help but to see the gleaming white
bandages wrapped around each of his wrists. They were the reason we were both
there.
The young man survived his attempt to escape this
world, but my naïve belief that Christians do not succumb to mental illness, thankfully,
did not.
Last week Matthew Warren took his own life in
California. I am positive he was not the only person who chose such a path, but
his name has caught the headlines more than others simply because his father
was a pastor. And that fact has disturbed me, greatly.
There is a subtle, and at times, not so subtle,
belief floating around the evangelical world which has long suggested that sin
and darkness and pain and tragedy and anxiety and sadness and loss and disappointment
and insecurity and crushing despair, hopelessness, mental illness and gnawing
emptiness are aspects of our fallen world for those “out there.” Become born
again, many believe, and this evil world can no longer penetrate your fully
fortified heart and mind.
Thankfully we don’t need the Warren family
nightmare to debunk this myth for us, because the one whom we claim to follow
was “a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering.” The pictures we create of
Jesus smiling represent a minority of prints, in part, because artists have
read the Gospels. It is an interesting exercise to read through the life of
Christ while taking note of the number of instances he is associated with words
like, weeping, sadness, illness, grief, and anguish in comparison to the number
of times we find his name in conjunction with happiness, joy, or laughter. I am
not suggesting that Jesus was bi-polar, but I am saying that he would have felt
much more at home in the hospital I mentioned earlier than I did that day.
I believe the scriptures when they promise that God
is close to the broken-hearted. That knowledge does not always talk people off
of the ledge of their despair, but it should most certainly help those of us
who appear to be so uncomfortable with issues of mental illness in the Christian
community, to know that God may actually be as close, and at times, perhaps,
even closer, to those who have them than those of us who claim to be healthy.
After all, Jesus himself clarified that he only came for those that are looking
for a doctor. Maybe it is time for the church to function more like a hospital
for people in search of a physician than a hall of fame full of trophies and
winners.
P.S. Last week our guest in chapel was a writer and teacher named
Natalie Flake. Her story of her husbands suicide and the struggles and
blessings that stemmed from the tragedy is a must read on the subject. www.natalieflake.com
