Most of us were never given the contract explicitly.
Nobody sat us down and said, in so many words, if you are truly walking with the Lord, your mind will not betray you. Nobody said it in a sermon. Nobody printed it in a pamphlet. If they had, we would have been able, later, to look at the document and notice that some of its clauses were not what the Bible said.
Instead, we absorbed it in pieces.
We absorbed it in the testimony where the depression lifted the moment the speaker surrendered to Christ. We absorbed it in the small group prayer request that quietly went un-prayed-for the second week, because nobody quite knew what to do when the answer was not coming. We absorbed it in the verse on the wall, do not be anxious about anything, hung as a command rather than an invitation. We absorbed it in the well-meaning friend at coffee who said, have you tried fasting? We absorbed it in the silence — the conspicuous silence — when someone in the front row mentioned their cancer in prayer and the congregation rose, and someone in the back mentioned their bipolar in prayer and the congregation did not quite know where to look.
This is one of the scripts the church is still handing out.
It is rarely written. It is almost never preached. It runs in the background — quiet enough that you do not notice it until something breaks.
The script says, roughly, this. Real Christians, walking faithfully, do not have minds that come undone. The mature believer's interior life is calm, joyful, and stable. If your mind is not these things, the question is what you have not yet surrendered, what you have not yet repented of, what you have not yet believed about the gospel deeply enough.
The script is not made up out of nothing. The Bible does describe a peace that surpasses understanding. It does describe a fruit of the Spirit that includes joy and peace and self-control. The script is what happens when those true things get bent slightly out of shape — when the gift of peace becomes the proof of faithfulness, when the fruit becomes the entrance exam, when the long slow work of the Spirit in a life gets reduced to a wellness metric your interior is supposed to hit by Tuesday.
The trouble with the script is that it has a specific failure mode. When the peace does not come, somebody is in breach. So when a believer's mind keeps coming undone — when the depression does not lift, when the panic attacks return, when the intrusive thoughts will not stop — there are only two available explanations. Either God is not faithful, or this believer is not.
Most faithful Christians, when given that choice, blame themselves.
This is the cruelty of the script. It is almost always turned inward. The believer does not first conclude that the script is wrong. The believer concludes, somewhere underneath, that the problem is them. They are not praying enough. They are not reading their Bible enough. They are not surrendered enough. They have a hidden sin somewhere that has not yet been confessed. The medication they are taking is, perhaps, a sign of weak faith. The therapist they are seeing is, perhaps, a substitute for the Holy Spirit they should be relying on instead.
The Bible knows what darkness in a faithful person looks like. The psalmist writes, darkness is my closest friend. Elijah, fresh from one of the great victories of his ministry, lies under a juniper tree and asks the Lord to take his life. Jeremiah curses the day he was born. Paul talks about being so weighed down he despaired even of life. These are not believers in breach of contract. These are the people God uses. The mind in pieces is not, in Scripture, a disqualification from faithfulness. It is, often, the territory of it.
But the script keeps running. And the cost of it, in our churches, is not theoretical.
The cost is the woman who stops coming because she cannot bear another how are you she has to lie through. The cost is the man who hides his medication in his sock drawer because he does not want his small group leader to see it. The cost is the teenager who reads the verse on anxiety and concludes she is not, in fact, a Christian. The cost is the pastor who has been white-knuckling a clinical depression for eight years because the congregation has been told, in a hundred small ways, that pastors do not have minds that come undone.
The cost is people who already feel the immense weight of mental illness now carrying, on top of it, the weight of a stigma their own church has handed them.
The unlearning of this script is slow work, and it is not, in the first instance, the work of the people who carry mental illness. It is the work of the rest of us. It is the work of the prayer meeting that does not flinch when the bipolar gets named. It is the work of the small group leader who learns to say I do not know what to say, but I am here. It is the work of the sermon that does not deploy the joy of the Lord is your strength as a bludgeon. It is the work of the elder who can talk about his own counsellor without lowering his voice. It is the work of the church that learns, slowly, to host both the cancer and the depression in the same prayer list, with the same seriousness, and the same length of time.
What if the people you have lost from your church were not, in the end, lost?
What if they were just no longer able to keep paying the cost of a script the church had quietly asked them to carry?
