bluerbluebluesky asked a question:

Hey JS it’s been a while, hope you’re well and congrats on your marriage (and your new books). Please bear with me, it’s weird writing in being removed from Christianity, but you really do seem like a genuine and real guy and I had really appreciated your words before. How do you stay confident in a good God when He has “fearfully and wonderfully” made you with depression? I can’t understand why He’d watch His kids live with chronic unbalanced neurochemicals that make them suicidal. Thanks JS

Hey dear friend, I appreciate your very kind words and I’m thankful for your honest challenging question.

I think there are really two ways to look at this. One is that God created everything in history, including death and disease and disasters, as a big ball of yarn that will one day be un-done by His glory. The other is that God created a perfect world of perfect yarn, but it became frayed when sin and death entered the picture and we now live within the stream of a disarrayed universe, which will be re-done by His glory. (If you’re a doctrine-nerd, the first view is called “supralapsarianism” and the second is “infralapsarianism.”)

The problem with the first view is that it assumes God is the author of evil and tragedy. The problem with the second view is that it assumes God is out of control somehow, as if He didn’t see this coming. It’s hard to reconcile either idea, and both of them have good points while bringing up tons of troubling questions.

As a fellow fighter of depression, this is personal for me, too. And I can only try to balance it right down the middle. I believe I wasn’t made with depression. I don’t think we were meant to be sick or starving or dead. And at the same time, I believe God is the author and He’s totally in control. I don’t know how both of these things can be true, but it’s beyond me to understand. My three pound brain is allergic to paradoxes and it might catch fire if I figured it out. So I live within the tension of a fallen imperfect world and a perfectly loving God.

What I won’t do is moralize or spiritualize any of this to say that “pain is a lesson” or that God gives everyone a “wonderful plan for your life.” I don’t know why such evil exists. I think it scares some Christians to say “I don’t know,” but I can’t pretend to draw lines between my depression and some epiphany. Our pain is going to be bad, and there’s nothing else I can do but let it bleed sometimes and let it be part of our story.

I can be certain of one thing.

Continue reading “Why Did God Make Me This Way?” →