The Bible has a small psalm tucked near the middle of the Psalter that almost nobody preaches from, and it is one of the most useful psalms in the canon for anyone living with mental illness.
Psalm 93. Five verses. Worth sitting with.
The psalm holds a tension most of our worship songs cannot hold. It does not pretend the waters are calm. The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring (Psalm 93:3). The psalmist says it three times in one verse. The waters are loud. The waters are loud. The waters are loud. He is not, in this verse, denying the storm. He is naming it, with a kind of insistence that the storm itself seems to demand.
If you live with anxiety, you know this verse from the inside. The roaring of the floods is a near-perfect description of what an anxious mind sounds like at 3 a.m. If you live with depression, the heavy waves are not metaphor. They are the actual weather of your interior. If you live with bipolar, with PTSD, with intrusive thoughts, with any condition that makes your inner world unreliable, the roaring is what you have been hearing.
The psalm is on your side. It does not require you to pretend the water is quiet.
What makes the psalm useful, though, is what it says alongside the roaring.
It opens with this: The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength. The world is established, firm and secure. Your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting (Psalm 93:1–2).
The waters are loud. The throne is older.
Both are true in the same psalm. The psalmist does not have to resolve them. He does not say because God reigns, the waters are not really roaring. He does not say because the waters are roaring, God does not really reign. He says both, in the same breath, and lets the contradiction stand.
This is the move the church has not always known how to make for the mentally ill.
We have, in too many places, taught that faith requires the silencing of the waters. That if the waters are still roaring in your head, your faith must not yet be deep enough. That the believer who has truly understood the sovereignty of God will, in some measurable way, stop hearing the storm.
The psalmist did not believe this.
He could hear the storm. He could also see the throne. Both at once. The faith, in his telling, was not the absence of the roaring. The faith was the noticing that, underneath the roaring, the throne had not moved.
This is what people in deep mental illness most need to know. Their feelings are not reliable narrators. Their perceptions, in certain seasons, will lie to them. The internal weather will tell them they are alone, abandoned, finished, beyond reach. The internal weather is wrong. The internal weather is the roaring. The throne, which they cannot feel, is the bedrock the psalm is pointing to.
Your statutes, Lord, stand firm; holiness adorns your house for endless days (Psalm 93:5). The psalm ends not with the storm calming, but with the throne still standing. The waters keep roaring on the page. The Lord, on the same page, keeps reigning.
If you are in the flood right now, the practice the psalm offers is not to silence the water. It is to remember, underneath the water, what has not moved.
The mind that is lying to you today is not the final reality. The chest that feels tight is not the final reality. The depression that is whispering that nothing will ever be different is not the final reality. The throne is the final reality. You may not feel it. The psalm does not require you to feel it. The psalm requires only that you let the existence of the throne be the thing your weight rests on, while the rest of you rides out the storm.
This is faith for the mentally ill. It is not the faith of the silenced waters. It is the faith of the man in the boat who can hear the wind and still trusts that the boat has been built by someone who knows what he is doing.
You do not have to calm the waters to be faithful. You only have to remember whose throne stands above them.
The waters may still be loud tomorrow. They may be loud for many tomorrows. The throne, older than all the floods that have ever risen, will be exactly where it has always been.
