2023-10-07 A Meditation on Nervous Breakdown

“3 Therefore when we could bear it no longer, we were willing to be left behind at Athens alone, 2 and we sent Timothy, our brother and God’s coworker in the gospel of Christ, to establish and exhort you in your faith, 3 that no one be moved by these afflictions. For you yourselves know that we are destined for this. 4 For when we were with you, we kept telling you beforehand that we were to suffer affliction, just as it has come to pass, and just as you know. 5 For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to learn about your faith, for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you and our labor would be in vain.” (1 Th 3 ESV)

People call it a nervous breakdown, a mental journey that requires an unattractive leap, a sense in which some mantra carries the day whilst the very persona is translated. The entire persona finds itself waking up elsewhere, prayers of inadequacy or fear, of temperance or survival, leading and holding, firming up some spiritual locus of resolve while the body and soul accept the nip and tuck, the end to the malaise, a finality to the amputating kind of self-harm or self-pity or fears of reproach.

Somber ruminations! Yet the formative hour is found upon awaking to a morning of “what did I finally do last night?” “What fears and bondage did I lunge through?” “What dire new sense of finality have I inaugurated in my life?” We fear to have gone crazy. We fear to have been too reliant on others. We fear to have ended our posh judicial approach to all things. We fear, because we have not the experience or brain pattern of a “now or never”, of a “reboot in safety”, of a “all good things…”.

All good things come to us even at this late hour, even at this winnowing hour. When finally we do see war joined, it will not necessarily be on choice terms, on our terms, with some efficiency and poise. Instead it will be us lancing forth with whatever has already been gotten up to; those in sin will remain in their sins, the difference only being that now they are forgiven those sins. Those happy will remain happy. Those with creature comfort, a doll or a token, will settle for that in the hereafter. Yet God prevails and provides, so that when we’ve finally lost out our hope in a recompense, it is there and then—at the outset of war—that He begins to redesign and upbuild.

What is all this to say? That this is the hour and today is the day: to murmur through a nervous breakdown, yet astonishingly to find hands there to catch us, and a grin on this the face of our peer, formerly staid and all business. We love one another, and that man-to-man love, woman-to-woman love, etc., is beyond any wild dreams of what we earn and deserve. It is us, stronger than we imagined, yet more needful than we imagined, finding it okay to lean on each other, finding it okay to go forth boldly into the uncertain night. To greet the day as though shackles and restraints were for a season wildly and in profligacy cast aside. To have recollection of a few things, no hangover of regret, but therapeutic Outlet and person-to-person love.