Jesus Isn't Enough

I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog for a while now, but I was never sure if I had enough material to make it worthwhile. Today, I stumbled upon a book that transported me back to the shame and guilt of my teenage years, that reminded me exactly why I have slowly and gradually walked away from the faith in which I was raised to a point where I can no longer honestly identify myself as a Christian. I no longer identify myself as anything, really, just as someone in transition. That brings me much peace.

The book that I found was an attempt to treat the behavior of self-injury, which is a symptom of much deeper psychological distress either from abuse or mental illness or both, with Jesus. This author's solution for someone who was dealing with this type of pain was...Jesus. Period.

Jesus isn't enough.

I know, because I was there. I did all the right things. I read the Bible, I prayed, I sincerely and truly believed in Jesus and the God of modern American evangelical Christianity. I worked on my "relationship" with God, and if I ever felt dissatisfied with my life or lonely or depressed, I worked harder. I read all the Christian books and magazines, I went to the youth conferences, I believed it all; yet I was still broken, and everything I read told me this was my fault because I just wasn't understanding what Christianity is really about. "It's not a religion, it's a relationship"...a relationship I couldn't ever quite attain. Therefore, I must have been doing something wrong. If I was still depressed, I must have been doing something wrong.

But I wasn't doing anything wrong. Jesus just wasn't enough. Jesus wasn't enough to heal my mental illness...it has taken therapy and antidepressant medication and a basic understanding of human psychology to get that under control. It wasn't because I wasn't trying hard enough or wasn't believing the right things. It's because I needed more than some vague idea of "Jesus' unconditional love" to understand that my perception of reality was crippled and that putting a Jesus band-aid over a bullet hole won't solve anything if the bullet is still in there.

I intend to expand on why I think the ideas in that book on self-injury are so dangerous in a later blog post, but for now I needed to get this blog up and running. I needed to tell the world that, no, I no longer try to make myself believe that Jesus is enough, I no longer feel like a failure for not being able to cure my depression with religion, and I am better off because of that. I am finally healing, which is more than Jesus ever did for me.