Before You BeginYour Mental Health You may have lived with low-grade sadness for as long as you can remember. Or maybe for you, it’s far worse than that—a daily struggle, accompanied even by suicidal thoughts.
If mental illness is a struggle you face, may I please wrap loving arms around you, look you in the eyes, and whisper, “This—your anxiety or depression or bipolar disorder or suicidal thoughts—is not your fault”?
You may be suffering from a true chemical breakdown in your body. I get that. Several members of my family depend on medicine to help regulate their brain chemistry. Please hear me: There is no shame in that choice. Praise God for tools that help.
I just want you to know—please, lean in close and hear this—that throughout this book, whenever I talk about God giving us a choice about how we think, I am not suggesting that you can think your way out of mental illness. I am not. I have experienced seasons of anxiety so brutal that I was paralyzed.
There are seasons when we need help in the form of counseling and medicine. But I hope to show you in the coming pages that in every season there is help we can access for ourselves. And that learning to think a single thought can help each one of us—those of us who struggle with mental illness and those whose struggles are of a different sort.
The Starting Line I can’t imagine a more anxious and spiraling feeling than being unsure about the meaning of life and the future of my soul. So before we begin, I would like to share the foundational truth that shapes the entire perspective of this devotional: We have been created on purpose for a purpose. We are designed for an intimate relationship with God forever. That is the context in which we begin to stop our spirals, to get out of our heads, and to be truly free in our souls and minds. Saint Augustine said, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” In other words, we will forever spin out until we know the One who saves us.
So if you are unsure today if you know Jesus, or if you need reminding of what He has done to make your healing possible, here’s the foundation for everything we’re going to talk about in these one hundred days: the gospel, or the good news.
We had a perfect relationship with God until sin entered the world through Adam and Eve. And with sin came the promise of death and eternal separation from God. But from the moment of the first sin, God issued a promise that would bring us back to Him.
The penalty had to be paid.
Our sin was to be placed on a perfect sacrifice. God would send His own blameless, perfect Son to bear our sin and suffer our fate—to get us back.
Jesus came fulfilling thousands of years of prophecy, lived a perfect life, and died a gruesome death, reconciling our payment for our sin. Then after three days, He defeated death, rose from the grave, and now is seated with the Father, waiting for us.
Anyone who accepts the blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of their sin is adopted as a child of God and is issued God’s very own Spirit, who seals and empowers us to live this life for Him.
Our souls will spin, restless and wanting, until they rest in God. After all, we were made for Him, and He gave everything so that our souls could finally and forever rest in Him.
If you have never trusted Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, you can trust Him this moment. Just tell Him your need for Him and tell Him of your trust in Him as your Lord and Savior. That’s where everything begins.
Copyright © 2024 by Jennie Allen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
