Do I Honor Christ?

I know I’m writing about my illness pretty consistently since October, and to be fair, that is the main purpose of this blog.  When I was first given the vision for the blog, it was to chronicle my struggles with mental illness and how Christ has met me at my best and worst to give me hope despite the malady I lived with.

 This morning, I was challenged.  I had thought that I was handling my illness pretty well.  I thought I had come to terms with it and accepted it as a part of Christ’s discipline for me.  I would be dismissive when others suggested I could and might be delivered from it completely, but I was only covering for my lack of faith in God’s power or in His love toward me.  You see, I didn’t believe that God WOULD deliver me.  I knew he could, but he didn’t, and the disease got worse. God was not testing me, he was mocking me.  I was ANGRY.  What kind of God, first of all, gives a person a mental illness?  Every other illness messes with the body.  A mental illness messes with the mind.  It has you questioning your value at the core of your being.  It makes you think that there is no control over your treatment or whether you will become better or worse.  You become worse at the drop of a hat.  That has happened to me this fall.  THREE ADMISSIONS to a psych unit!!  In just TWO MONTHS!!  What is fair or loving about that?

 I now struggle with those questions.  I am thankful to my pastor for issuing the challenge that he did – are we honoring Christ? I know that I haven’t been.  I’ve been saying all of the “Good Christian” things, I’m doing well, God hasn’t left me, I know that better days are coming.  In fact, I have been SOOOOO ENRAGED at the way my life has been lately that I didn’t know what to do about it.  –  But now I do.  Thanks Pastor Rob.

 I am not promised anything. God has given me everything that counts. He is so far beyond my comprehension that I don’t always get what he is doing, so like a small child, I clench my fists and stomp my feet.  Thank God that He is patient, always.  God’s ways are not my ways, but I know that he is all loving.  He loves me, even with my illness.  He didn’t cause it and, yes, he could remove it, but If I believe Him to be all loving, omnipotent, and massively intelligent, he has a reason for leaving it.  He won’t leave me.  I know from experience that he won’t, and His word tells me he won’t.

 So I choose to trust – in His love, in His wisdom.  I mourn my losses caused by the illness, but rejoice at what I have gained because of it. I am able to reach out to others suffering as I do, who maybe don’t know my Lord, and I can love them.  I know what it feels like to be betrayed by your own mind.  I can relate to others going through the same thing.  Is this part of how God will redeem my disorder?  I think it is.

 I will honor Christ in my life. I want His best for me, and I am completely curious as to how it will unfold.  In the meantime, I will revel in what I have been made to be and try to use the uniqueness of his creation of me to the benefit of those I see whom I can help.  I know and trust that there is a purpose in my being.  I love the one who made me to be what he has planned.  If I lean on His plan, I will rise in ways that I could never imagine – ways that are so far above any I could create myself.  Who could want more than that?

 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

                                                                                                                                                                               Isaiah 55:8