God’s Unending Love in the Midst of Mental Health Challenges

By Travis Jones

I said but why cry when your friend die if you gon’ resurrect him
He said the promise of heaven don’t take away the depression
-Outside, nobigdyl. & Mogli the Iceburg

Mental health conditions are uniquely challenging and understanding how God and the Scriptures speak to us about it is not as straightforward as one would hope. What does God say about our mental health; things like depression, anxiety, and other conditions?

The Bible does not address mental health conditions in the terms we might easily recognize today, but that does not mean that these conditions were not around in the times of the biblical authors. 

I want to call our attention to the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 19. In this narrative, we see that Jezebel wants Elijah dead, and he is filled with fear and flees for his life into the wilderness. It is here that Elijah asks God to take his life from him.

How does God respond to Elijah’s fear and despair? By meeting his basic needs, giving him rest and food. Elijah then goes a six week journey into the wilderness and when he finally comes to Horeb (Mt. Sinai), he confronts God with all that has been weighing on him. 

We see here that Elijah is likely experiencing what we would refer to as anxiety and depression. God’s response is not rebuke or judgment, but a loving reminder of the truth and some steps to help comfort him.

We know from our wagon wheel principle that as humans, we have both spiritual and physical aspects to our humanity. The problem is that we sometimes view mental health challenges as solely a spiritual issue, thinking that a mental health condition is the direct result of demon possession or undisclosed sin. However, that ignores the reality that there are also physical things happening inside our brains and bodies that can cause these conditions. On the other hand, we may solely think in terms of the physical, relying only on medication to address a mental difficulty that is also affected by our spiritual lives. 

We cannot separate our physical and spiritual lives, they are holistically connected as integral parts of our humanity. We see this in how God cared for Elijah, addressing his fear and despair (emotional) with food and rest (physical). We also see throughout the New Testament how demons, a spiritual reality, affect the physical reality of many individuals and communities, and how Jesus, who was physically present, was able to address such situations. These individuals affected by demons were not only affected spiritually, but physically too in their mind and behavior, because they are holistic human beings. So we cannot reduce mental health to only a physical or spiritual issue, it is both and. 

God addresses our mental health conditions through both physical means (such as food, sleep, medication, therapy, etc.) and through spiritual means (prayer, worship, gratitude, meditation, etc.). So we as Christians ought to be able to help one another put on the “belt of truth” as Paul says (Ephesians 6:11) by reminding each other of what God says of us and our world, while also helping one another with the physical realities of life, through supporting a healthy lifestyle (think holistic health), and being able to find healthy ways to cope.

We learn from Paul’s “thorn” in his flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7-10) that some conditions (visible and not visible) may be healed and others may not. While we cannot say why some are healed and some are not (Isaiah 55:8-9, John 9:2-3), we do know that what we may see as weaknesses or deficiencies, are often viewed differently by God. Overall, we are called to draw near to our neighbors struggling with mental health challenges, and see how God’s unending love is present even in our shared sufferings.

Finally, when considering how God cares for us holistically, we ought to remember that for our neighbors dealing with poverty, “Poverty is traumatic, and since society isn’t investing in its treatment, poor people have their own ways of coping with their pain.”¹ We as the Church must care holistically for our neighbors experiencing poverty, not only addressing their spiritual aspect of their humanity, but also their emotional, physical, and relational aspects as well.

¹ Matthew Desmond, Poverty By America, 15.