Monthly Archives: December 2019

 I was depressed and anxious for quite some time, but God took me through a letting go of many things, through to a freedom, particularly a freedom to be an artist.

I wouldn’t have said it, but I perceived God to be in crisis; I couldn’t help but assume that he, like me, must be operating from fear. The God I knew was benevolent, but not free. His world was hemorrhaging, and he was losing most people. His Church including me, was pathetic and wounded and in woundedness was wounding others. It was this Church, however, that he was depending on to accomplish his mission and, though he did love them, he was constrained to treat them like machines because the situation was so dire. Christianity was a desperate salvage mission; again, God was losing most people. He must be absolutely exasperated.

He couldn’t possibly afford to give me time off. My failure and utter collapse, twice, from my attempts at ministry must be additions to his exasperation. As kind as he was, he must ultimately be disappointed because I had rendered myself entirely ineffective – and that’s what he needed me to be most… effective. We were in crisis, after all.

Mission over desires. Mission over needs. Mission over health. God needed that kind devotion to deal with his cosmos crisis. Maybe if the world was in a better place, he could afford to let his children play but the present was serious, and performance was critical. I had owned the primacy of mission since growing up in the mission – my parents were missionaries. In a way, I’d been a machine since around the same time that depression and anxiety started, my preteens. Being useful for an anxious God can give a sense of purpose, much like a codependent relationship with a needy parent. Filling a hole that he couldn’t otherwise fill or extending the reach of his arm, that’s how I understood Christian mission.  

But in 2015 my mom died and I absolutely collapsed. In 2018 I fall in love and lose it and absolutely collapse a second time and develop fibromyalgia which to the present is a hard limiter to my capacity. Years of living in crisis mode had withered me.

But I had, at the same time, been learning truth and knew something about the voice of God, which apparently, is that which casts out fear. For a while I had thought the voice of God was the fear, the obligation, the demand. But I began to learn that the voice of God was the radical other force called grace, which was, amazingly, both conscious of every crisis I was conscience of, and entirely unperturbed. God could see true cost and true consequence and could still forgive. I couldn’t know how God could be unworried in the face of the crisis of his cosmos, but I was invited to believe this: that God is not afraid. Fear is a binding; God is not so shackled. Fear assumes a scarcity or deficit, but God is not finite, he is infinite, and nothing is impossible with him. God is always free.

There is no point in cosmic history at which God entered emergency mode, tensed up, and shut down a piece of himself – as we do in crisis. God remains free. He is free, to judge, free to forgive, free be human with us if wants to and suffer with us as he has. Christ’s participation in our humanity – that was not obligation, and the Immanuel advent was not a contingency plan. Apparently, it was always the plan. God remains unperturbed. Nothing has forced him into a corner. Nay, he always acts in freedom and in the fullness of his abundance.

The bedrock of my healing was the un-anxious and compassionate presence of God that I found when I let go of everything that I thought had made me effective for him. God invited me to do so, to stop worrying about my effectiveness. Absolutely defying my scarcity paradigm, I found then that God was much larger and more resourceful than I once knew him to be. He did not require my performance for anything.

I found that God can afford to attend to my health particularly, even with the world in crisis. He is pleased to do so, and he is resourceful enough to do so, not being limited by this world’s deficits, or my family’s deficits, or my church’s deficits. God could afford to remain emphatically invested in me. He cared more about me than my effectiveness. God is in fact, the Good Parent and the First Romantic, after whom every human expression of love is modelled.

Acquainted now with an un-anxious God that attended to me even when I could return nothing except presence – acquainted with this God, I could begin to relax out of crisis mode and begin to heal. I could only then deal with the traumas I had collected and the deep exhaustion I had accrued. In the safety of God’s attending love, I could unravel and build back up from a better foundation.

And I could begin to live life in freedom, not in fear. I had known that freedom in moments before – and they were real – but my primary mode had been reactive fear. Now, however, I could begin to live in that freedom more consistently, trusting that that God was invested in me and was creating me, and was doing so in freedom and pleasure, not out of obligation.

And mysteriously, or perhaps quite naturally, now finally I could give myself permission to be an artist. As an artist, playfulness is paramount. In my prior mind I couldn’t condone playfulness, or experimentation, or exploration. They were frivolous and I could not be sure that they would make me effective. I couldn’t justify playfulness before, but now at last, I could, because I could see God’s playfulness everywhere and because I could see abundance even in crisis –  or over crisis. Though God does suffer with us, he is not consumed by it, and not diminished by it. He rises, and he laughs, and that laughter is the resolution, the final word, and the consummation.

So now my art is released to be heraldry and authentic expression, and not emergency propaganda. Effectiveness is not the first metric of my art, rather faithfulness is. I’m free to make a piece faithful to its feeling and to its truth. Faithful to the grief, which is true, to the life, which is true, to the pain, which is true, and to the victory, which is true.

I certainly have goals for my art and its delivery, but I am not defined by whether or not those goals are achieved. I am a loved son of God first, and an artist second. The second receives freedom and impulse from the first. I am free to pursue excellence and I am free to fail. I am free to be very new at this. I’m free to be obviously naïve about many things, including the music industry which I will need to engage with.  

God is free and unafraid. He participates in our humanity’s pain but is not diminished by that pain. Since God is not living reactively but deliberately and creatively, I am assured. My identity is secured by God, my un-fearing foundation. I can build my vocation on that steadiness, that assuredness. I don’t think I’m depressed anymore, at least not constantly. I am much less afraid, and I’m surprising myself with new freedom to be venturesome and creative.  God is free, and I am consoled.