Preface (revisited)
This series began with a simple truth I struggled to say: I am beloved. But before I could believe that, I had to acknowledge something else: I’m wired differently. This second part is about what happened next. About how grace didn’t come through a miracle at the altar, but a prescription pad. And how I learned that pills, too, can be prayers. This is about faith, healing, and the sacredness of help.
Wearing the Mask in Sacred Spaces
People in the church told me they would pray for me. That healing would come. That hospitals were okay, sure, but mostly we were expected to be fine. We asked each other how we were, but it was perfunctory. A cultural imperative. We weren’t expected to really answer. And in the churches I served (even in progressive ones) the subtext was clear: if you were struggling, your faith wasn’t strong enough. You hadn’t prayed enough. If you were worried, something was wrong with your soul.
So we learned to put on the same masks at church that we wore everywhere else. Masks of joy. Of purpose. Of faith. Even in the communities founded on vulnerability, we learn quickly when and where it’s appropriate to struggle. Not in worship. Not in meetings. One-on-one, maybe. Quietly. Discreetly.
I remember once preaching a Christmas Eve sermon about grief. I wasn’t grieving. But I knew many people in my congregation were. A woman told me afterward that her son thought I might be suicidal. I wasn’t sad. I was honoring the sadness others carried. But even that was too much. Too honest. Too exposed.
Cracks in the Armor
For years, I knew I struggled. I had different masks for different rooms. One for worship. One for meetings. One for classes. I wore them all so well, until the seams began to split. When I cried in a Christian Ed meeting. When I snapped in a presbytery gathering. When I couldn’t hold it together. Some people tried to help. Most just tried to cover it up.
There were times I’d leave a meeting, head still buzzing, unsure what I had even said. I’d obsess over it later, replaying conversations, wondering who I’d offended. I was constantly reading the emotional temperature of a room, but unable to regulate my own.
Therapy helped. But like many with undiagnosed ADHD, it wasn’t enough. I knew I was unraveling. My mind spun and scattered. My prayers got shorter and more desperate. I couldn’t keep making it.
The Risk of Asking for Help
I feared medication. Especially Adderall. I’m a recovering alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink in nearly seven years, but I’ve always known I have a propensity for addiction. Alcohol once gave me a gift: it made me feel like I belonged. It quieted my mind. Made me fun. Flirty. Able to do small talk. But when I stopped drinking, there was nothing left to numb the storm.
Even as my prayer life deepened, I could feel the fraying. I was unraveling in sacred places.
And still, the church told me to pray harder. Get help, sure, but the church wasn't going to help, and it didn’t want to know too much. It didn’t want the journey of healing, but the healed rejoicing.
The Bible tells stories of healing, but rarely is faith alone enough. Even Paul needed someone to touch him, to guide him when he first met Jesus on the road to Damascus. The paralytic was healed not by his own faith, but by the faith of his friends who lowered him through the roof just to get to Jesus. Grace moves through people. Through community. Through presence.
When Grace Comes in a Pill Bottle
Eventually, I used an online service. I found a psychiatrist through Mindful, an online ADHD service. I met with a coach and therapist too. We tried several medications. And then: Adderall.
The first time I took it, I felt it. A stimulant surge. Then—quiet. Not sedation. Not numbness. Just quiet.
I could hold a thought. I could follow through on a task I used to hate. I could pray. I could breathe like someone pulled out of the water. My wife said, “You’re more present than you’ve ever been.” And I was.
It was as if the constant waterfall of thoughts, crashing down all at once and scattering everything in their wake, had been turned down to a steady stream. My mind still moved, but now it was more like a bathtub filling up, slower, quieter, something I could sit in rather than drown beneath.
One afternoon, I sat beside my daughter while she drew. That’s all. She was quiet, humming to herself, and I just sat there. Not looking at my phone. Not fidgeting. Not calculating my next task. I just watched her create. I watched the way her hand moved across the page and how she paused to admire her own work. I wasn’t thinking about how I’d use it in a sermon. I wasn’t analyzing. I was there. Really there.
And in that moment, I realized: this is what presence feels like. This is what love can be; undistracted, undeserved, unhurried. A grace I could finally stay long enough to receive.
It didn’t fix everything. But it gave me back to myself. And to God.
Praying Without the Noise
Before Adderall, prayer was a battle. Not static, just like all the radio stations playing at once. Meditation? I couldn’t stay still. My mind ran on loops. I felt like a spiritual failure. But after? I stayed. I didn’t perform. I didn’t pretend. I just was. And I swear, God whispered, “I’m so glad you’re here.”
It even helped my anxiety and depression. I hadn’t realized how intertwined they were with my wiring.
For so long, I treated them as separate storms; depression as heaviness, anxiety as restlessness. But they shared a common root in the structure of my mind. The overthinking, the inability to focus, the spiral of guilt and pressure. It was all connected. My brain wasn’t broken; it was simply unregulated.
Anxiety, for me, was a low-grade earthquake beneath everything. The sense that something was about to fall apart—me, a project, a relationship—and it would be my fault. Depression, meanwhile, was the aftermath. The rubble. The shame that I hadn’t held it all together.
When the Adderall began to work, the shaking slowed. When the Lexapro joined it later, the shame started to lift. I realized how much of my prayer life had been dominated by begging God to fix me instead of trusting that God was with me in the mess. I began to believe that being beloved didn’t mean being free from struggle. It meant being seen. Known. Still held.
There are still hard days. Days when I feel like I’m too much or not enough. But the medication gave me a chance to see that those thoughts aren’t prophecy. They’re patterns. And they can change. They are changing.
Running Out and Starting Again
But then came the Adderall shortage last year. By August, I was rationing. By September, nearly out. Life threw more curveballs. Anxiety surged. Depression stalked. By November, I knew I needed help again.
That shortage didn’t just test my resilience. It forced me to relearn something I’d forgotten: I still had to care for myself, even when the world around me felt unpredictable.
Self-care isn’t selfish. It’s sacred. American culture judges worth by productivity. God sees worth in being. You matter because you exist.
And yet it’s hard to believe that, isn’t it? When the world around us keeps whispering that we’re only as valuable as our last completed task. That unless we’re producing, fixing, helping, doing, we’re somehow failing. It’s hard to unlearn the lie that rest is laziness and asking for help is weakness.
But Jesus didn’t just teach rest, he practiced it. He stepped away from the crowds. He left the demands of others unanswered. He slept in storms. He withdrew to pray and be alone. Not because he didn’t care, but because he did.
There’s a reason flight attendants tell us to put our oxygen mask on first before helping others. Because if you’re gasping for breath, you can’t save anyone. If your soul is suffocating, your service becomes self-erasure.
To care for yourself is not only wise, it’s faithful. It honors the breath God gave you. It keeps you tethered to your humanity. And it creates space to love your neighbor not from exhaustion, but from abundance.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, depleted, or numb, please hear this: tending to your mental health is not a detour from your faith. It might be the most faithful thing you do this season.
Jesus took time away to rest. So I did too. I took leave. I started ADHD coaching. Got back on Adderall. And was diagnosed with moderate depression and severe anxiety.
Lexapro and the Practice of Love
Lexapro joined the mix after my depression and anxiety diagnosis.
It changed me. Before, I lived in survival mode. I reacted. I shut down or over-felt. I pulled away, then panicked when I felt alone. I didn’t know how to be with people, not really. And that was the strangest part, because I’ve always been an extrovert. I’ve always been loud, eager, engaging. But even in my most sociable seasons, I was deeply anxious inside, constantly wondering what version of me people wanted, or needed, or would tolerate.
Being around people felt like performance. Like I had to always be “on.” Like I had to earn my place in every conversation. It wasn’t that I didn’t love people. I did. I do. But I didn’t know how to love them from a place of rest. I didn’t know how to show up as myself, without shame humming beneath the surface.
Lexapro didn’t take all of that away. But it turned the volume down. The anxiety didn’t vanish, but it no longer controlled me. I could notice it and still choose to stay. I could be in a room with others and not wonder the whole time if I was too much or not enough.
Lexapro taught me how to love myself as I am. Not as a fixer-upper. Not as someone whose value depends on perpetual improvement. But as someone already worthy of care. Someone already beloved. It showed me that I can’t simply fix myself, and that I don’t have to. That sometimes, the answer to prayer really does come in pill form. And with that kind of help, I can be prayerfully present with others. And maybe, in that presence, even become an answer to someone else’s prayer.
All because I finally chose to take care of myself.
Nearly immediately I began to linger with my congregation after sermons. I wasn’t running away. I wasn’t scanning the room for exits.
Lexapro taught me love. Adderall taught me presence. Together, they taught me to stay.
Grace in the Clinic
I never believed holy things only happened in church. But I’ve come to believe grace happens in clinics, too. In prescriptions. In therapy chairs. In the quiet voice of a doctor saying, “You’re not broken. This is your brain. And there’s help.”
The Word became flesh. Touched lepers. Healed with spit and dirt. He put his hands on the hurting. He made mud from the ground and saliva to open blinded eyes. He didn’t stand at a distance to deliver healing. He entered into people’s pain, into their very bodies. He met them in their flesh and healed them from the inside out.
So why wouldn’t grace enter through the body, too?
Why wouldn’t grace use neurotransmitters and blood flow and chemical balance? Why wouldn’t grace work through the hands of clinicians and the voice of a therapist? Why wouldn’t grace whisper through the click of a pill bottle lid, through the slow unwinding of tension, through the ability to breathe again?
If the incarnation means anything, it means this: the body is not too low for love to enter. The body is where love chooses to dwell. Grace doesn’t float above us like a concept; it moves through us like blood. It doesn’t wait until we’re strong to show up. It starts with touch. With breath. With brain chemistry and trembling hands.
The clinic, like the cross, is a place where flesh and grace meet. And both are holy.
The Body Keeps the Grace
They say the body keeps the score, and they’re right. Trauma rewires the nervous system. It embeds itself in our muscles, our hormones, even our DNA. Studies on epigenetics have shown that descendants of Holocaust survivors and enslaved people still carry the biochemical echoes of generational trauma. What we go through doesn’t vanish. It gets stored. And sometimes, it stays hidden until it becomes unignorable.
The fight-or-flight response doesn’t simply live in the mind, it lives in the body. Our shoulders tighten. Our heart rate spikes. Our breath shortens. The body remembers the fear even when our conscious mind has moved on. That’s why healing has to happen in the body, too. Not just in thoughts or prayers; but in cells, in rhythms, in neural pathways that learn to fire differently over time.
But if the body keeps the score, I’ve come to believe it also keeps the grace.
Grace is stored in the same nervous system that once screamed danger. It’s in the steady breath that returns after panic. In the loosening of the jaw. In the softening of the shoulders. It’s in the way your feet feel grounded after a long walk. In the way tears come; not as breakdown, but as breakthrough. And it’s also in the sudden laughter that surprises you after weeks of heaviness. In the joy of singing along to a song you forgot you loved. In the warmth that floods you when a friend sees you and really sees you. Grace isn’t only what calms the storm—it’s what lets you dance again when the waters have stilled. Joy, too, is part of the healing. And when it returns, even briefly, the body remembers: grace has gotten in.
Grace is in the neural pathways too. In the slow, sacred rewiring. In the regulated breath. In the moment you realize you no longer spiral after that text or shut down in that meeting. In the fact that you got out of bed today.
Grace is in the brain. In the chemistry we once saw as our curse. In the serotonin that allows you to sleep. In the dopamine that helps you see beauty again. In the neuroplasticity that lets your mind slowly become a place you can live in.
Grace doesn’t just dwell in doctrine. It dwells in your body. In healing. In presence. In the holy whisper: “Be still and know that I am God.”
And I believe God is just as present in that stillness as in the storm. Maybe more so.
Grace doesn’t wait for perfection. It gets in our bones. Our breath. Our bloodstream. Grace gets in our brain.
A Benediction for the Wired and the Weary
I still take my meds. I still pray. I still wrestle.
But I’ve stopped treating those things like contradictions.
Because some days, the holiest thing I do is take my pills and tell the truth.
And the truth is: I am loved. Not when I’m cured. Not when I’m calm. But now. In this.
And so are you.
If you’re not sure where to begin, or you want someone to talk to, feel free to leave a comment or send a message. I’m not a therapist, but I’ve been in the wilderness, and I can point to a few paths.
And if you’re in a place of deep struggle, please know this:
You are not alone. Help is available.
You can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline anytime, 24 hours a day, for free, confidential support.
You were made for love.
Don’t suffer in silence.
Let’s walk together.
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