Broken People, Big Plans
I don’t know about y’all, but for me, there have been times when I felt like way too big of a mess to do anything significant for God or even be a Christian at all. I mean the Bible talks about God giving you peace, love, joy and hope right? So if I’m not experiencing those things all the time does that make me less of a Christian? The answer is absolutely not.
I struggled with Generalized Anxiety Disorder for the majority of my time in High School. There was a particular season during my junior year and the first half of my senior year when it was pretty bad. I let the fear of rejection hold me back from relationships, social situations, and was constantly exhausted from fighting off thoughts telling me I was messing up, everyone hated me, and that things would never get better. I’m planning to write another post with more details on what this looked like for me and my healing journey with anxiety, but for now, I want to focus on what God was doing in the thick of it.
Because I was spiraling so often, I felt like a complete fraud telling others that Jesus gives a peace that I was struggling to receive myself. And on top of that, I thought people would look at my anxiety and think that Jesus didn’t “work” because I was suffering. They would think that he doesn’t have the power to give peace or heal me from that anxiety since I still had it. These thoughts built up for a while and I began to think I was to broken to be used by God. I tried keeping them to myself to save myself from further humiliation, but lo and behold it all came out in the car one day with my two best friends. I pretty much had a mental breakdown and cried to them about how shameful and embarrassed I felt to be struggling. I told them I hadn’t talked to God in weeks because I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I like to refer to this as “ghosting God.” And take it from me, doing that never ends well. All I felt was lonely and shameful, and my anxiety peaked even more.
My friends listened and didn’t judge me at all. They encouraged me to go back to Jesus and ask him about everything I was feeling. So I did. I picked up my Bible and started reading 1 Thessalonians 1. As I read, verses 6-8 stood out to me. They read:
“You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message (The Gospel) in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. And so you became a model to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia- your faith in God has become known everywhere.”
This praise Paul gave to the church in Thessalonica immediately registered with me. I thought my anxiety invalidated the work that God was trying to accomplish through me. I thought my battle with the flesh and the enemy disqualified me from being able to be used by God and be an ambassador for his kingdom. But boy was I wrong! It was that very thing that DID qualify me to represent him! This verse says that the people became models because even when they were suffering, they still held tight to the message of the gospel and didn’t give up on their faith. There will be times when your world is rocked. You’re uncertain, fearful, grieving, and angry. And it’s ok to feel those emotions. But at the end of the day, when you lay it down at the feet of Jesus and allow his hope to fill you, other people recognize that there is a difference in the way you handle your trials. What sets you apart from the world isn’t that you’re always happy and perfect and never have anything going wrong. Jesus himself tells us we will face trials and persecution. But it’s the way we respond to this suffering that stands out to others who long for the same hope that we have. As a result, our faith becomes known to others and plants seeds for them to experience the same hope we do!
Crazy enough, I had been praying for someone at the exact same time I was experiencing this doubt and after I read these verses this person reached out with curiosity about faith and the need for prayer. I thought I had to have it all together for God to provide opportunities to share about my faith, but here I was in the midst of my anxiety being able to share about the God who gives me hope even in my hardest moments, not because I said and did the perfect things, but because they saw how much the gospel meant to me despite it all.
Maybe your brokenness looks different than mine. It could be other kinds of mental health struggles, grief, past trauma, relationship baggage ect. But don’t believe the lie that says you’re too broken to be a Christian! That is literally the opposite of what is true. God uses all our suffering for his good purpose to bring more people to know him. He makes us a new creation and gives us a hope to keep us grounded in the midst of any trial. God has big plans for you and no suffering you experience can ever limit the power he has to carry those plans out.
