Depression, Anxiety, and Other Things We Don't Want to Talk About by Ryan Casey Waller

Author:Ryan Casey Waller [Waller, Ryan Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: self help, mental health, Christianity
ISBN: 9781400221332
Google: K7_WDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1713571609
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2021-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

IDENTITY IS A CHOICE

Shortly after I returned from in-patient rehab, my bishop hauled me into his office and abruptly asked, “Who do you understand yourself to be?”

I took a moment to consider the question before saying, “Well, I’m first and foremost a human being. I’m also a husband and a father—”

“No,” he said, cutting me off. “You have a problem with chemicals. So, let’s try this again. Who are you?”

I understood what he was getting at. He wanted me to say I was an alcoholic. He wanted me to see myself first and foremost as a problem drinker. The trouble was, his question hit at the very core of the primary issue I had been working on in therapy, but it ran in the wrong direction. In treatment I finally learned to stop couching my identity in anything other than my relationship to God. I finally came to terms with the fact that I suffer tremendously from the sin of pride, meaning I don’t really believe I am enough as I am but rather that I need to earn my value by making myself worthy of admiration and love through achievement. Instead of accepting what God had already offered for free, I was bound and determined to make it costly and ultimately unattainable.

There is a reason the psalmist implored us to be still and know that God is God. The instruction is meant to guide us into a place of peace where we can trust in the Prince of Peace to provide all the identity we could ever need. But so long as we remain obsessed with “earning” our place in this life, we’ll never truly be able to trust that we are God’s beloved children—a status we did not earn and one we can never lose.

By the time I made it to the bishop’s office that day I was finished measuring myself by what I did or did not do. In rehab I’d decided to no longer think of myself as a pastor or lawyer or therapist or writer. Likewise, I was not a problem drinker—not at my core. All of these words were simply descriptors of things I sometimes did and sometimes didn’t do—not who I was.

Instead of continuing the endless chase for an identity of my own creation, I chose to model my life after Jesus, who was perfectly content to describe his identity solely in terms of his relationship to his heavenly Father: “The works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me” (John 5:36). That’s who he was, and that’s what his life was all about. The most important lesson I took away from rehab was that I was finished thinking of myself as anything but a beloved child of God. For it was only in that place—a place of total and radical acceptance—that I was able to find the strength I needed for the journey back toward health.

But this mentality didn’t sit

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.