I love J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From the first time I picked up the well-worn paperback volumes of Tolkien’s works from the shelves of our family’s library, I have felt a strange kinship with the places and characters of Middle-earth. Undoubtedly, I am drawn to this world and story because it is, as Tolkien himself admitted, “a fundamentally religious . . . work” that reflects the True Story of our own earth (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 172). Rather than serving as a momentary, illusory escape, it illuminates from real life, reminding me of what is true and urging me to fight for all that is good and noble and right.

Just as powerful (and in some ways even more so) is that in the pages of this epic adventure, I also see my own story. As a younger reader I was, like most preteen boys, drawn first to those characters who exhibited the greatest feats: Aragorn, in particular, was a favorite, along with the wizard Gandalf. As the years have passed and I have returned again and again to this story, however, I have been drawn ever closer to the Hobbits.

I am not drawn to the Hobbits because I have faced dragons, scaled the heights of Mount Doom, or borne the fate of the earth on my shoulders. Those tasks have already been accomplished by Another who long ago bore a great weight up a hill to defeat a dragon. The particular affinity I have felt with the Bagginses comes from their peculiarity — a peculiarity I share as someone who has been “there and back again,” or what some have called a “Third-Culture Kid.”

Strange Hobbits

Both Bilbo and Frodo, during their adventures with the big folk of the world, undergo a change that sets them apart from the other Hobbits of the Shire. For Bilbo, the change brought no burden. Though he was “held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be ‘queer,’” he was “quite content.” He may no longer have fit the expectations of a respectable hobbit, but he was at peace in his own home and “remained very happy to the end of his days” (The Hobbit, 275).

Frodo’s own experience bears some resemblance to Bilbo’s, though without the same measure of peace. After he and his companions save the Shire from Saruman, Frodo departs for the Gray Havens. A deeply saddened Sam exclaims, “I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.” Frodo responds, “So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam” (Lord of the Rings, 1029). Bearing the mark of his wound at Weathertop and the effects of the One Ring, Frodo is no longer at home in the Shire. Though no one can easily see it, the indelible marks of his adventure have made him an alien among his own people.

Children who grow up away from their home culture bear a similar resemblance to the Bagginses. By all appearances, they seem to fit in with the good folk of their “Shire.” Yet prolonged adventures in distant lands have produced changes in them that do not disappear upon their return. Because they have spent time in the worlds of men, dwarves, and elves, the Shire becomes for them a different place. A certain sense prevails that they do not quite fit in with the other Hobbits.

Third-Culture Kids

The technical term for this group of people is Third-Culture Kids (TCKs). A TCK (also referred to as a “Global Nomad”) is defined as

a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership of any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background. (Third Culture Kids, 19)

In other words, they have absorbed and assimilated to aspects of multiple cultures such that they belong partially to all of them without fully belonging to any, a “confusion of cultures,” as one TCK put it (37). They sustain a wound that will “never really heal” (Lord of the Rings, 1025). Everywhere they go (except when together), they are prone to experience a sense of alienation. They recognize that they don’t really belong, at least not as others do. At home everywhere, they are home nowhere. In their countries of origin, they are often difficult to recognize. TCKs are hidden immigrants who bear all the marks of citizenship yet often feel distinctly out of place. They are Hobbits without a home.

TCKs respond to their out-of-placeness in different ways. For some it proves a more challenging identity than for others. Upon return to a “home” culture, some just want to fit in and leave behind all the strangeness their upbringing carries with it. Having learned to adapt to new settings, they blend like chameleons into their surroundings, often escaping all but the most practiced eye. Others revel in their cultural nonconformity, eager to invite others to share in their unique upbringing, taking every opportunity to recount the joys (and perhaps hardships) of their adventures.

“TCKs are hidden immigrants who bear all the marks of citizenship yet often feel distinctly out of place.”

Regardless of how TCKs feel, the experience of being a global nomad means that, for this group, the biblical description of saints as “sojourners and exiles” is palpable (1 Peter 2:11). They experience the reality of being an alien everywhere they go. This terrain can be difficult to navigate, of course, but few TCKs would trade their nomadic past. Time spent as aliens abroad has given them a deep appreciation for others. They’ve learned to see the world through multiple lenses. Many gain insight and wisdom beyond their years.

One TCK puts it this way:

Besides the drawbacks of family separation and the very real adjustment on the permanent return to the [home country], a child growing up abroad has great advantages. He [or she] learns, through no conscious act of learning, that thoughts can be transmitted in many languages, that skin color is unimportant . . . that certain things are sacred or taboo to some people while to others they’re meaningless, that the ordinary word of one area is a swearword in another. (Third Culture Kids, 77)

In other words, the “wound” may be permanent, but — as I and many other TCKs have discovered — it unlocks passages to whole new worlds.

Rich Tapestry

We might be surprised by how many people today fit the description of a TCK. In an increasingly globalized world, many families spend significant time overseas. Business developments or a military reassignment might require an international move. A church might send a family to the mission field. Local circumstances might cause a family to relocate to a new country. There are more TCKs among us than we realize.

These global nomads bring with them a unique opportunity — quite simply, the opportunity to discover. Understanding what it means for TCKs to have spent significant time overseas requires knowing more than where they lived and what strange foods they ate. The complex of interweaving histories, cultures, experiences, and questions requires time to unravel and draw out. To those who don’t share similar experiences, the intricate web can appear too daunting to even attempt navigating.

Many TCKs discover that few have the patience or desire to get to know their past lives beyond the bounds of the Shire. Content simply to know the strange Hobbit grew up overseas, they move on with life as normal and expect the TCK to fit right in. Too often, TCKs receive the unspoken and unintended message that their background, while interesting, doesn’t really matter. Leaning in to their past and drawing out their experiences will reveal that what first appears as an incomprehensible tangle turns out to be a rich tapestry of intermingled hues.

Seek Out the Stranger

In my experience, it will take work to discover that beauty. Most TCKs do not go about spilling the myriad details of their past. They’ve learned that the lack of shared background creates an unconscious impasse that few seek to traverse. The few who do often find that they’ve entered worlds unknown, filled with dichotomies of the strange and familiar, the shocking and beautiful, the sorrowful and joyful.

Don’t neglect seeking out opportunities to get to know the TCKs in your midst. Identify who they are in your church (whether among adults or youth). Invite them over for dinner or take them out to a global restaurant of their choice. Ask them to show you their mementos. Participate in their traditions. Listen to their stories. If you’re a pastor or ministry leader, consider reading about TCK experiences so you can better minister to their unique needs. Learn to see the strange Hobbits in your midst, embrace them as fellow pilgrims, and lean in to the beauty you are bound to discover.

As a senior in high school, I played an accountant in The Actor’s Nightmare. He wakes up on stage, in the middle of a play, only he doesn’t remember any of his lines, or how he got on stage, or when he ever read a script or attended a rehearsal, or even what play he’s in. Everyone around him knows who they are and who he is, but he’s lost, clueless, and letting everyone down — all with a big audience watching.

The play was inspired by the awful recurring dream so many actors have, being suddenly thrust on stage to perform a show they do not recognize, in a role they cannot name, with lines they cannot recite. The nightmare, however, might also be an accurate picture of how many young single men (even Christian single men) feel in their actual, wide-awake lives. Who am I supposed to be? What role am I meant to play? Who are the good guys and bad guys? Where am I supposed to stand and work and live? What story am I in? What wars am I trying to win?

Stumbling Through Singleness

When I see that accountant stumbling around the stage, putting his foot in his mouth, sweating profusely, I see something of my own single life — wrestling with where to go to school, shuffling through majors, meeting new friends, losing touch with old ones, then reconnecting with some, starting my first job, and then my second job, and then my third job, moving from apartment to apartment, then house to house and city to city, trying to find a wife and failing, and then trying again and failing, and then mustering the courage to try again. All while everyone seems to be watching me sweat and stumble.

So how do you think the accountant figured out who he was? He studied the other people on stage. The keys to knowing who he was supposed to be lay with the men and women who had been placed, very intentionally, around him. What if the same is true for living as a more faithful single man? What if some of us stumble, wander, and struggle more than we have to because we spend so much time looking in at ourselves and so little time looking out and around at others? For some of us, it’s like we woke up on stage, in the middle of a play, and yet never mustered the courage to get out of bed, much less play an actual role.

My burden in this article is to give Christian single men better perspective and greater courage in singleness. I want to convince you that you are not as single or alone as you think. Because I wasted some single years. Because I’ve watched other men do the same. Because you don’t have to. I want to help men like you play the man God made you to be.

Fundamental Questions for Men

What questions do you think drive and consume the average twentysomething man? What kinds of questions keep him up at night and spur his decisions?

Where do I work?
What is my role?
How much do I make?
What do I want to watch?
What did so-and-so say about so-and-so on Twitter?
Where do I want to eat?
Did my team win or lose?
How much can I afford to buy?

Many men spend most of their best strength and energy, day after day, year after year, on shallow questions like these. I want you to ask better questions, bigger questions that will demand more of you and draw more out of you. In the end, I want you to see yourself, through these questions, as less isolated and alone.

1. Who’s Over Me?

Before we look at the relationships around us on stage, we need to remember who wrote the script for us. Before a man can be the man he was made to be, he needs to know and love the one who made him to be. If we could trace all the dysfunctions and failures that plague men to one root issue, it would be our disregard of God.

Do you believe that about yourself? Do you see that the health of every other relationship in your life grows out of your relationship with Christ? We’ll never faithfully act out the part we have been given if we’re out of touch with the Author of the story.

The apostle Paul writes specifically against sexual sin in 1 Corinthians 6, but what he says helps us make sense of every other dysfunction in a man’s life:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)

As much as you may feel otherwise from day to day and week to week, you are not your own. You don’t get to do whatever you want, whenever you want — not if you’re in Christ. You belong to him twice over: he made you and he redeemed you. So glorify God in your body — consecrate your body, your time, your energy, your ambition more fully to him. Strive to cultivate, enjoy, and model an “undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35).

2. Who’s Ahead of Me?

As a man, you will inevitably become like the men you admire, spend time with, and imitate. The calculus won’t always be easy, but discerning people will be able to trace aspects of who you are to the men who have had the most influence on you (for better or worse). Many young men fail to mature because they lack mature men to follow and learn from. They grow up and live without good fathers.

As I near forty, and have now discipled younger men for years, I believe no single earthly factor will determine a man’s maturity more than the man (or men) who father him. And yet too few men have good fathers in the faith. Maybe they have men they admire and imitate from afar, but they don’t have an older man who actually knows them well enough to affirm, confront, and encourage them specifically and personally. John Calvin and John Piper can be spiritual fathers for you (they are for me), but they can’t be your only fathers (or even your main ones).

Who can say of you what Paul says of the younger men in Corinth?

I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me. (1 Corinthians 4:14–16)

He can say, I’ve known you well enough to call you beloved children, and you’ve known me well enough to imitate my way of life. What older man knows you well enough to say that? What older man do you know well enough to imitate how he meets with God, how he loves his wife and children, how he serves the church, how he wins the lost? If you don’t yet have a father relationship like that, who could that man be? The best place to begin looking is in your local church, where the family of God — fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers — lives together and loves one another (Matthew 12:49–50).

In my experience, the younger man will often have to initiate relationships like these, so don’t wait for an older man to come put his arm around you. Identify the men worth imitating, and then go and ask them for wisdom, for counsel, for time, for fathering. Look for ways to come alongside them in the ordinary rhythms of their lives. Make it as easy as possible for them to spend time with you.

3. Who’s Beside Me?

After a good father, every man also needs good brothers. He needs friends. And not just any friends, but friends who consistently draw him toward God and draw God out of him. This is why men instinctively love the picture from Proverbs 27:17: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” Sharpen iron for what? He’s likely talking about sharpening an axe or a sword. Men sharpen one another for battle, and we’re all at war (Ephesians 6:12). Who helps you fight well?

These aren’t buddies you watch football with or play video games with online. They’re men whose faith makes your heart rise and run after Christ, who kneel down and pick you up when you stumble and fall, who rally you to live worthy of your calling and hold you accountable, who jump into the hard trenches of life and ministry with you. They’re not just men anymore, or even just friends; they’re brothers.

We’re looking for something deeper and stronger than biological brotherhood. Proverbs says of this rare kind of friend, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24). Do you have male friends like that? If not, who might become your company of iron? Again, start with your church. At first, it may not seem that you have a lot in common with those men, but if you share Christ, you have far more in common than you realize. Every friendship that’s risen to this level in my life started with meeting to open God’s word together. Most of them grew and matured through serving the church in some tangible way together.

4. Who’s Behind Me?

Few men have good fathers in the faith. I’m tempted to say even fewer have found and made sons in the faith. But every man of God should be a spiritual father to someone. This is what faithful Christianity is: “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). Who are those disciples for you? If nothing in our lives looks or sounds like Jesus’s Commission, then are we really living a Christian life? Can we really say we’re following Christ?

The apostle Paul had many sons in the faith, including a young man named Timothy. He says to Timothy, “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). In other words, Timothy, as I have been a father to you in Christ, go and be a father to others. Take a younger, less mature man under your wing for a season, and patiently and diligently teach him the ropes of following Jesus. Draw him into your life and marriage and family and work, and then live so that you can say, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). As you do, you’ll be surprised how much you grow and benefit from pouring your life into him (Philippians 4:1).

It really doesn’t matter how old you are or how long you have been a Christian. If you’re old enough to read this article, some younger man — in your church, in your neighborhood, at your job — looks up to you. How are you stewarding his eyes? How are you engaging his questions, desires, and failures? Again, don’t wait for him to ask you for help or counsel. Go and be a father.

5. Who’s Against Me?

Satan knows that the most solid single men are the men most loved by spiritual fathers, brothers, and sons. He’ll do whatever he can to make you feel alone, and then to make that loneliness feel like freedom. He’ll make danger feel safe. He’ll slowly lead you away from the kinds of relationships you need, and then distract you with meaningless anxieties and pleasures. Do you even know you live at war?

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith. (1 Peter 5:8–9)

In your apartment, at your desk, beside your bed, on your computer, even over your Bible, you have an enemy. A fierce and intimidating enemy. If the Christian life feels hard — if relationships like the ones I’m describing above feel unrealistic or even impossible at times — it’s partly because someone is relentlessly attacking and undermining you. He’s not a metaphor. He’s a real spiritual being, and he hates you. He wants to devour you.

But if you are Christ’s man, the one who lives in you is stronger than the one who wars against you. And he’s not a metaphor or a fairytale, either. He’s the King of the universe, the Warrior who will judge the earth, and you are fighting on his side. So don’t ignore your enemy or underestimate him, but don’t back down either. Lean on the men you need — fathers, brothers, and sons — and follow Christ into battle.

I love being a Christian.

I mean, I love Jesus, but I love all the rest of it too: brunch after church with friends and hylomorphism and late-night Eucharist on Christmas Eve and C.S. Lewis and John Donne and Charles De Koninck. I love Durham Cathedral and the Aksum Empire and Neoplatonism and canon law and candles and martyrs who chose death over denial and countless little communes of monks and Anabaptists and Puritans and Methodists and charismatics who read Acts 2 and 4 and decided to just go ahead and do it.

I love knowing that nothing good will be lost and there are no ordinary people and death has been killed. I love sacred Scripture mysteriously breathed by God through the words of men and that our God and King gave us his body to eat and his blood to drink.

And I also think it’s true, so there’s that.

But there have been times I have found belief to be almost unbearable. And I’ve met enough people who have shared this particular difficulty that my story might be worth sharing.

Walk Away, or Pray for Faith

I was baptized at 16, but didn’t become serious about following Jesus until grad school. And then for the next decade or so, I went through . . . call them “crises.” Times I couldn’t stop thinking, obsessively ruminating on certain things — two in particular.

First: If Calvinism was right, as I then understood it, how could I understand that God is good? Second: How can I live in a world where people I love may be going to hell?

These circling thoughts left me exhausted over my own attempts to make sense of everything, and with a grief-fueled nostalgia for the time when, as a secular person, I didn’t worry about any of this stuff. I felt alienated from non-Christians and even from Christians who didn’t share my intensity and anguish.

During some of my worst moments, I felt like I was presented with a choice: you can cease believing, or you can pray for faith. Ceasing to believe didn’t feel like a choice that would change reality. It felt like choosing to somehow sit on the sidelines, to become a non-player character. Yet apostasy did seem to offer me the psychological comfort of escape.

I prayed for faith.

Obsessive Moral Threats

I’m not sure when I first heard the word scrupulosity. At some point, I probably googled “religious OCD,” which is more or less what it is. And I was very familiar with OCD.

Around age 12, I was diagnosed with “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” If you’re unfamiliar with OCD, it makes threats that feel moral. You feel like you’re both morally wrong and physically unsafe, and what will put you morally and physically right again is obsessively performing various rituals (you’ve heard them: handwashing, not stepping on cracks, etc.). Often, what you care about most is what the disorder “chooses” to threaten you about: “wash your hands just right or your child will die, and it will be your fault.” That kind of thing.

Most people with this disorder are not delusional. They know the threat isn’t real, that it’s irrational, which often makes the disorder profoundly embarrassing. “Don’t mind me, just going to, um . . . wash my hands seven times and then turn off the tap with the backs of my hands, because . . . well, you go ahead and start dinner.”

I ended up receiving various kinds of treatments (medication, cognitive behavioral therapy), which helped enormously. And by the time I was out of high school, my OCD was pretty much dealt with. It proved to be a weird blessing in my life to have experienced this before my adult conversion, unrelated to Christianity.

After college, I started spending time with people who actually believed that Jesus was not at all dead. And then I found that I actually believed that too. And the stakes in life suddenly became much higher.

Enter Scrupulosity

Conversion is always disorienting. But God gave me time to work through the normal confusions of new Christianity: the sense that there is nothing one can hold back; the realization that God makes no guarantees that you won’t, for example, eventually be martyred; all the normal pricks of an awakened conscience; all the joy and amazement that first Christmas when the carols you’ve sung your whole life suddenly come alive and blaze with glory.

Then, sometime within the first two years, I had my first major bout of scrupulosity.

Like OCD, scrupulosity produces an irrational sense that one is in profound danger and has a bad conscience. It’s confusing because it can overlap with one’s “real conscience” and real fear of hell, but it’s distinct enough to recognize once you get to know it. I could discern something “off” about it. It wasn’t “what reality is like,” “what being a sinner and having a bad conscience is like,” or “what Christianity is like.”

Being curious by nature, and also a nerd when it comes to history and historical theology, I started digging and discovered that scrupulosity is a spiritual malady that has caused pastors to say, “Oy, not this again,” for about two thousand years. It’s also a neurological, OCD-related condition that can be treated on that basis. In fact, confessors, spiritual directors, and pastors have been using tools similar to cognitive behavioral therapy for a good portion of church history — long before medications provided additional treatment options.

Christians’ Doubting Disease

There are two pretty distinct versions of scrupulosity. There’s the one that resembles “classic” OCD, which leads sufferers to obsessively perform rituals, like prayer (“If I don’t say these exact words with exactly the right feelings, they won’t count”) or confession (Luther’s poor confessor!) in order to feel like they’ve gotten it “right.” And then there’s the delightful experience of repetitive, racing thoughts, obsessively ruminating over theological questions, which one feels like one must resolve in order to be at peace. Neither makes for a particularly good time. But in my experience, the ruminations are the real bear.

OCD has been called the “doubting disease.” Did I really lock the door? I think I did. I remember doing it. But if I did, why do I doubt so profoundly that I did? Why do I feel in danger? Better check. In other words, subjective uncertainty presents itself as something to pay attention to, something that gives good information.

Now imagine how difficult it might be for those dealing with this disorder to evaluate their subjective assurance of salvation, which in some Christian traditions has been viewed as a necessary mark of true salvation. If one must sit on the “anxious bench” until one receives assurance, a person with an unaddressed scrupulosity disorder can sit there for a long, long time.

As I said earlier, questions I found myself obsessively ruminating over included “Does God want everyone to be saved?” “How can I trust that he wants me to be saved?” The questions can get very refined indeed: “If Calvinistic monergism is true, is God good? Is ‘good’ meant equivocally or analogically when we predicate it of God? Are you sure? But are you sure? How about ‘love’? Better think about this for five hours in the middle of the night to try to solve it.” My scrupulosity demanded that I give attention to these subjective uncertainties until I had subjective certainty, the kind that doesn’t come like that. And during the darkest seasons of such ruminating, I was tempted with apostasy as a palliative for my psychological pain.

But I prayed for faith.

Living with a Trustworthy God

I know this might sound simplistic at first, but one of the most helpful things for me has been simply learning to trust God more. I don’t mean “trusting God” as some immediate mental choice in moments of struggle, though it is that too. Rather, I just mean living with him as my King for longer, and learning that he is trustworthy and that I don’t need to get answers to all my theological questions before I am able to rest in that.

“God’s character is one thing we do not need to doubt.”

In non-religious OCD, one learns to talk back to one’s mind: “Yes, I know you are subjectively uncertain, but that has nothing to do with reality.” As a Christian with religious scrupulosity, I do the same. And more, I’ve learned to get out of my own head. I have a kind of mental box, Susannah’s Big Box of Unanswered Theological Questions. I’ve found it incredibly helpful to realize it’s okay to have such a box, and that there will be items in it until I see God face to face, and probably afterward. The fact that we don’t see how all the data points of Scripture and experience and tradition fit rationally together should not for a moment cause us to discount the data points we do have about God’s character. His character is one thing we do not need to doubt.

In my worst episodes, I didn’t really doubt the truth of the Scriptures. In a sense, that was part of the problem: scary passages felt like chains binding me, guns pointed at my head. But it also meant I could hang on to the passages of God’s unequivocal grace. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:9). There is nothing original that I can offer here: these are uncompromising promises about God’s character and his love of each of us, and of those we love. I held on to these white-knuckled. And then, gradually, I realized that I didn’t need to hold on that tightly, because I was being held.

Out of the Pit

If you’re wondering whether you or someone you know might be suffering with scrupulosity, it can really help, first, to know that it is a thing. It’s a real neurological disorder, and there are many online resources available from credible medical and Christian ministry sources to begin understanding how it works and how to pursue diagnosis and treatment. It’s also an old thing. I found help reading memoirs and anecdotes of saints from the past who have suffered very similar experiences, like St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Ignatius, or John Bunyan.

“When your own thoughts are a trap, you cannot just think your way out of it. You need the help of others.”

It’s also important that you don’t attempt to figure it out alone. Doubt, anxiety, and fear are common human maladies (Philippians 4:6–7; Hebrews 13:6; James 1:5–8). And of course, some anxiety is good (2 Corinthians 11:28), and some fears are real (Luke 12:5). We all fall somewhere on a spectrum with many kinds of mental distress, so discerning what’s “normal” and “abnormal” can be tricky. A good place to start is talking with your pastor, if possible, and/or trusted, wise counselors (particularly those with some familiarity with scrupulosity). When your own thoughts are a trap, you cannot just think your way out of it. You need the help of others, ideally professionals.

And if you feel tormented by scrupulosity’s obsessive ruminations, and tempted by the psychological comfort that apostasy seems to offer: take the leap. In the face of that choice, pray for the grace of faith to be given to you in abundance. And then throw the whole kit and caboodle, every means of grace, at this thing: prayer, Scripture, saints around you, ancient saints, SSRIs, cognitive behavioral therapy, all of it.

I also say this: dare to hope that you will be okay again one day, that you will again find “joy and peace in believing” (Romans 15:13). God, as it happens, is patient. He is also analogically, though not univocally, good and loving. And the ways in which his patience and goodness and love are not univocally identical to ours, his are more so. Always more, not less.