When It Felt Like God Wasn’t Fair
Written by James Burke, Australia
If you’re anything like me–someone raised in the church–you grew up well-versed in the Bible. You knew the stories of God’s deliverance of the Israelites; David slaying Goliath; Jesus being born and performing His miracles; and many other stories of God’s faithfulness. Positive stories. Stories of God being a provider, a protector.
Growing up, I thought that’s what God would be for me.
If you’ve listened to the episode where the Anxious Faith team turned the tables on me as the Podcast Host and interviewed me instead (if not, you can listen to it here), you’ll know that the mental health journey my family and I have been on has not been one of smooth sailing. Downs seemed to be followed not with ups, but with more downs. Hit after hit seemed to keep coming. And as this happened over the years, I got angry at God.
Enough, I used to think. When is this going to end? When is it our turn for things to get better? God, why do you keep doing this to us?!
That anger and bitterness clung to me for far longer than I care to admit. I didn’t lose my faith–I still believed in God, and still believed in His salvation for me. But the God that had been shown to me during my childhood seemed very absent.
Night after night, month after month, I’d cry out in prayer, asking God to help. I didn’t ask for full and complete healing from mental illness, but for Him to make it even just a little better. An incremental step was all I wanted; something to ease the pressure and burden I felt. But even that didn’t come. And after crying out for as long as I could, I stopped.
God had left me.
I don’t know exactly how long I felt like that for. It was a period of years, at least. What confused me even more was the fact that I felt like I was doing what God had called me to do–I was using the skills and talents He’d placed in me not for my own gain, but to serve His Kingdom through working in various ministries.
I tithed. I prayed with my wife, and my kids, and we went to church and small-group every week. I was spending quiet time each morning reading my Bible and praying–at least, more mornings than not. Yet no matter how much I prayed for God’s strength, deliverance, or healing–or no matter how many other people prayed for us and over us, nothing seemed to change.
God wasn’t being fair.
There began to be this block in front of me that I could not move. God wasn’t holding up His end of the bargain. I knew that He didn’t promise an easy life (John 16:33). I knew that believing in Jesus and accepting His sacrifice wasn’t a shortcut to comfort and stability. But surely it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. It wasn’t supposed to be to the point where intrusive thoughts ruled my mind and depression took hold.
Sure, I was still working in ministry, doing the work I felt God gave me to do. I would even have said I was being effective–we could see the fruit God was producing from our efforts, hearing stories of lives being impacted, faith being kindled and grown. But personally, it felt that He’d put it all on hold for me by distancing Himself from me, and not making things any easier for us as a family. The intrusive thoughts wouldn’t go away. The depression set in deeper and stronger. And still, my prayers went unanswered.
Even Elijah Wanted to Curl up and Die
As a teenager, my Youth Group used to put out a “magazine” each quarter, just for our church and purely for our own entertainment. We would have different people writing articles, contributing artwork or photos, and we’d interview an older or lesser known member of the church to feature. Being teenagers, one of our stock questions was to ask them what their “favourite violent Bible story was”–inevitably getting responses like Samson slaying 1,000 men with a donkey jawbone (Judges 15:15-16), Jael killing Sisera with a tent peg (Judges 4:21), or my personal favourite, 42 boys getting mauled by bears for calling Elisha bald (2 Kings 2:23-24). It was a memory I had buried, but for some reason, I began to think on those passages again.
I started to realise that the Bible was more than just good-news stories; that in its pages it contained violence, devastation, and the whole range of human emotions. I could have told you from a head-knowledge point of view that the Bible talked about the different emotions people faced, such as the songs of lament in the psalms, but that knowledge hadn’t made its way to my heart until I re-read 1 Kings 19.
Elijah had just killed the prophets of Baal, after he proved that their god was not real (1 Kings 18:18-40). He’d asked God to bring rain after three years of drought–a drought which he’d also caused, further demonstrating God’s power (1 Kings 17:1). Surely Elijah would have been on such a high, buoyed by God’s victory, that Jezebel vowing to kill him wouldn’t have bothered him–if God could stop the rain and start it again through Elijah, and make fools of 450 false prophets, surely he wouldn’t let anything happen to Elijah!
But Elijah was terrified. He fled as far as he could with his servant, then left his servant and walked another day into the desert. When he had walked as far as he could, he sat down, and asked God to let him die (1 Kings 19:3-4). Reading this again, post depression diagnosis, hit me in a completely different way.
Elijah, a prophet of God, was still someone who wanted God to kill him–even after seeing the power and might of God displayed time and time again. And the more I delved into the Bible, the more I began to see other stories of humans at the end of their tethers; Job’s story isn’t one of immediate resolution. The psalmists that cry out about being abandoned and forsaken by God were at a point where they’d been taken from their lands and lived as slaves for generations.
Each of these people in the Bible would have had the right to feel like God wasn’t being fair. Why did Elijah have to get to a point of wanting to die after succeeding for God? Instead of letting him die, God provided. Rest. Food. More rest and sustenance until he was strengthened again. And then, Elijah continued on with his ministry.
We don’t know whether Elijah still felt depressed after this point, but we do know that he continued to do what God asked him to, and serve in the way he was called. And I like to imagine that Elijah, being human, would still remember and at times dwell on the darkest point he got to, just like we often can, but that he would also remember what God did for him at his lowest.
Slowly, I began to see what God had done for me. He hadn’t done a big, miraculous transformation in our lives. My depression wasn’t gone, our family’s mental health struggles weren’t magically behind us. But I began to see that He had sustained us. We were making it through, even if it didn’t necessarily feel any easier. He was bringing people into our lives in different ways and at different times that eased our burden a little bit.
But most of all, I realised that God hadn’t left me.
There was a permission in rediscovering this part of Elijah’s story, that revealed a fear I’d been harbouring without knowing–a fear that my depression meant there was something wrong with my faith. But if God’s own prophet felt that way, and God allowed it to be recorded in the Bible, then surely I too was allowed to feel that way–and still believe in God. I was allowed to be depressed, to struggle with intrusive thoughts, and still have faith. God could (and did) still use me.
I saw that my relationship with God wasn’t a pact, or a contract that had to be negotiated. God was under no obligation to make my life easier just because I was doing what I felt He wanted me to do. But the more I could recognise my fears and doubts and have angry conversations with God, the more I understood that He would never leave me because of that.
I finally saw how much He had done for me, over and above anything I could ever imagine. I came to realise that God really isn’t fair; He’s given me grace, even though I don’t deserve it. And that gives me hope to continue on.
The Quickening Dawn
I’ve never liked the metaphor “it’s always darkest before the dawn”. The logical part of my brain wants to argue that it’s factually incorrect–it’s darkest at the exact midpoint between dusk and dawn. It doesn’t continually get darker and darker until in an instant dawn breaks and the sun is shining at its brightest.
If you’ve ever been outside in the bush or country before dawn, especially when there is no moon, you know how dark it can get. You can’t see anything, not even your own hand in front of your face. But without you even knowing it, dawn is approaching. It doesn’t announce itself with brightness and grandeur. Instead, there’s that eerie feeling of realising when the first light is beginning to show and you can start to see the faintest outlines around you. That light builds slowly over minutes or hours depending where you are in the world.
Eventually the sun peeks over the horizon, and the true light of day is shown.
That’s a closer description of what happened to me. I was there, in the dark, and the light was approaching, but I hadn’t realised it yet. It didn’t hit me in one fell swoop, but instead slowly over time, I realised the light was building and growing, and I can't even pinpoint when it first began to shine again. I just know that it did.
James Burke
James is the host of Anxious Faith, a project born out of having lived a life involving mental health for the past 15 years. He also serves full time with Our Daily Bread in Melbourne, is married to Beth, has two kids, and loves camping and gaming with his family.
