There are millions of Christians who are in the closet right now.
It’s not the one you’re thinking of.
These clandestine believers also live half in darkness; always carefully crafting the public persona that will allow them to blend-in seamlessly, continually managing perception with every conversation and ultimately withdrawing into silence and solitude when it all gets to be too much.
They’re also in your church, your small group, your ministry team, and your Friends List. They’re probably in the building or bus or the room where you’re reading this right now.
Today, as impossible as some pastors, preachers and pewsitters may make it seem, there are faithful, prayerful, obedient followers of Jesus who are in the life-choking grip of severe depression—and they’re terrified to tell you.
So much of our Christian culture has been soaked in a feel good, pray-it-all-way, Jesus-fixes-everything, Prosperity Gospel cocktail that makes it all but impossible for us to admit in the Church when we are internally broken; to confess that despite all the reasons for the contrary, we still feel hopeless and sad and dead inside.
Modern megachurch pastor’s Twitter Feeds now read like gooey self-help seminar slogans, promising financial security, physical health, and yes, mental stability, (better known as peace of mind), if we will just “Let Go and Let God.” They serve as smooth-talking, white-toothed, used car salesmen, assuring us that God is good, and because of this, everything else should be too, including your head.
This dangerous (and frankly, un-Biblical) sanitizing and simplification of suffering, only serves to add a nice weighty layer of spiritual guilt and a heavy dose of religious inadequacy to what is already there. (It isn’t enough that you feel horrible, but you also begin to feel like a really crappy Christian to boot).
The message isn’t always stated as clearly, but it is always clearly received: Either you aren’t praying hard enough, or you need to read the Bible more, or give more money, or do something, ’cause real Jesus-lovers don’t frown, and they don’t cry for no reason, and they definitely don’t think about exiting the party early.
I’m here to tell you that they do—all the time.
As a pastor of students, I get to experience it almost weekly. For nearly two decades I have counseled Middle and High Schoolers, many of whom have crippling anxiety and paralyzing pain that is ravaging their lives. These are Christian kids, with Christian parents, in Christian youth groups, and still somehow, amazingly they’re finding it almost impossible to move or to live or to care.
And often, the parents who love them have brought them to me, so that I can fix them. They’re looking for me to provide just the right prayer plan, or the perfect Scripture passage, to magically remove whatever it is that has debilitated their child.
And if that all fails, (as it sometimes does); when we’ve all prayed and talked and read and worshipped and prayed some more, there comes I time when I suggest that maybe this is something that shouldn’t be battled spiritually, but medically. (Often, this is received like an off-color joke at a preschool Christmas program).
In the same way that the Church culture has awkwardly declared war on Science, it has done so with Medicine. We have made seeking help from doctors or drugs or therapists, some admission of spiritual defeat, and in doing so we have completely ignored the fact that God may have provided the kind of intellectual acumen and technological progress that allows us to now reach those who had before been unreachable; in the deepest places of our brains.
Christians have over-spiritualized religion and under-spiritualized everything else, restricting God to work only the pulpit and prayer room; never entertaining the idea that He can and will do miracles in laboratories or classrooms or hospital rooms too.
But ultimately this is not about whether prayer or prescriptions is God’s way of healing. This is about giving all of us who believe in Jesus, permission to feel pain, even as we praise. The Bible is filled with real, raw emotion, and much of it sounds like the stuff we feel, but don’t like to admit.
You may be a Christian struggling with deep hurt right now, and yet you may feel like you’re surrounded in The Church by nonstop joyfests, filled with nothing but catchy songs, cheerful potlucks, and the endless praise reports of answered prayers and overcome demons.
That is simply not the truth.
In fact, the reason it so often feels that way, is because so many around you are also in the closet. We too have been taught, that depression and faith are incompatible (by those who’ve apparently never read about Moses, the prophets, David or the disciples), and they now believe that admitting anxiety somehow disqualifies them from discipleship.
As a pastor, one who not only cares for those struggling with depression, but who has battled it for decades himself, I can promise you, that it is possible to trust Jesus, and yet struggle to find hope some days.
What should you do? Well, you should pray for healing. You should seek comfort in Scripture. You should consult the counsel of caring pastors and priests and ministers. You should ask God to bring peace.
But if those all fail, don’t stop there.
Don’t try to be a silent, suffering saint any longer.
Don’t conceal your pain from your faith community, because if it’s real, it will meet you there.
Don’t buy into the lie, that following Christ always removes all of the struggle.
Don’t restrict God, to only a building for an hour on Sunday.
Know this: It’s OK to be a Christian, and not be OK.
Come out of the closet.
