I spent a couple days off my anxiety meds this week. It was not voluntary — a combination of not realizing I was that low until I went to refill my pill sorter, and then the time it takes for the prescription to be transferred to a new pharmacy and filled.
I don’t recommend it.
While I am well-aware of the near-cliché of the person who feels they don’t need meds while on meds and so they fall into these cycles of on and off, this has never been me. I know there’s this serotonin thing that my brain doesn’t do properly on its own. And so, much as a diabetic requires medication to help it manage insulin, I need similar help.
But here’s the thing: I forgot how much I needed help. And that has me thinking about how badly we need the kind of help that Jesus offers.
Over the years (and thanks to the wisdom of the spiritual giants of ages past), I have come to a certain imagining of the way God has built us to live. As we have been crafted by the Artisan, we require certain nutrients: things like food and water for our bodies, but also community and purpose and belonging and love. But there is also another nutrition we need to be healthy, for we require the nutrition of what Jesus called the Kin(g)dom of God. Our very being runs on its energies just as surely as our bodies run on calories from the food we eat. And when we do not get a sufficient amount of this nutrition, that deficiency can warp us with sickness, malformation, and death akin to a spiritual scurvy or rickets or osteoporosis or things far more terrifying.
Spending a few days off my meds has reminded me just how easy it is to avoid these sorts of nutritional deficiencies. But it also reminded me that even those of us who most know that we need Jesus’s help may not turn to his Table with the regularity we need to avoid these distorting malnutritions from settling into our lives.
With Jesus, every day is a new day and every moment a second chance. But Lent is always a great season for new beginnings.
Remember, we’re all in this together.
Pastor Michael