DEPRESSION CONFESSION Thursday, March 13, 2014 “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15). If you are like me and you are at least thirty or older, you may have a general memory of where you were on March 12, 1989. Yet, we had no idea that, on that same day, something was being birthed that would forever alter the course of our lives and world history – the Internet. One thing is for certain. The Internet has played a primary role in creating what we now call the global community. It did so by leveling the conversational playing field, making speed of light communication around the globe reachable at our fingertips. We’ll never be the same. Five days before that 25th anniversary yesterday, Ron Suskind’s new book, “Life Animated,” was published. Suskind, a Pulitizer Prize winning author and Harvard professor, has a son who was diagnosed with autism at three years of age. Autism, a neural development disorder, locks people away into a world of their own, shutting them off from meaningful connection even with those who love them most. Trying to unlock his son’s emotional and psychological prison, Suskind discovered that his son loved Disney’s cartoon characters. Mimicking those characters, Suskind found a language his son could understand. He and his son now have a genuine relationship all because his father leveled the conversational playing field. The gospel’s primary theme is that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In Christ, God leveled the conversational playing field by speaking a language we could all understand. In so doing, God not only unlocked the bolt on the sin prison that had cut us off from a relationship with our Creator, God also modeled for us how we are to live our lives as Christ followers. God didn’t wait until we could understand the mystery of the Eternally Divine. Instead, God confessed God’s self in a way that breaks through to us and frees us from our sinful isolation from God. The author of Hebrews celebrates that we now have access to God because God made God accessible by becoming flesh and blood reality among us. We tend to use Hebrews 4:15 to affirm our belief in the sinless savior. Behind that, however, is the confession of God that Christ put himself at risk. Christ did that by exposing himself to the full experience of flesh and blood reality, down to the last dregs of daily temptations that plague us. Christ not only revealed God’s divine character, Christ also confessed God’s Word-becoming-flesh humanity. It’s the full humanity of Jesus that levels the conversational playing field between God and man, woman and child. It’s a brain twister but it is also the cornerstone of our faith. In so doing, Christ also modeled for us how we are to go about leveling the conversational playing field with those God has given us to love and serve. The only way we can possibly do that is not to just confess the impact of God’s redeeming grace in our lives but also to confessi what it was in us that needed redeeming – our full humanity. One day, an elderly hospice patient introduced himself to me with these unusual words. “Every time you hospice people come around all you do is remind me of how sick I am. It’s very disturbing.” There was a day when I would have taken that personally, as though the man who didn’t even yet know my name had judged me and cut me off. Now, I know that man was simply confessing his painful encounter with his own mortality. It was only when he confessed his real fears that I was able to take a step toward helping alleviate the pain of bearing them until he dies. On a Jr. High school bus traveling back home from a bench-sitting four quarters of football, I overheard Scott tell someone else about his mother’s depression. Scott wasn’t even talking to me. Yet, in what Fred Craddock would call “overhearing the gospel,” I found release from the embarrassment I would never have confessed to anyone about my own mother’s nervous breakdown. Almost fifty years later, Scott and I are still very close brothers in Christ. It was Scott’s human confession that drew me to him, not the fact that his life appeared spotlessly perfect. I didn’t know that my mother wasn’t the only mother suffering clinical depression until I heard Scott’s confession. The confession of his and his wonderful mother’s humanity made it possible for me to embrace my own and open it up to the redeeming love of Jesus. We won’t reach the world by trying to prove that, because we are “saved,” life is a tiptoe-through-the-tulips vacation with Jesus. We’ll only reach the world by first confessing the pain of our flawed humanity. Our Savior is also our model. Only when others know how human we are will they be willing to hear our confession about how our encounter with the Eternally Divine has changed our lives forever.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 11:51:53 +0000
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