My First Prozac

Week of Monday, February 4, 2002

Every few years InterVarsity Christian Fellowship gathers all of its employees from across the country for a national staff conference. We were 1400 strong this year in Orlando, representing ministries to collegians and faculty on over 500 campuses. Plenary sessions can be lively due to contemporary worship styles and intense rivalry and partisanship among campuses. Any mention of a particular university evokes loud hoots and hollers. On the first night, when a speaker identified himself with the University of Texas at Austin, a close friend and colleague sitting beside me whispered in my ear with mock sarcasm, “I took my first Prozac in Austin.”

My friend has worked through some serious life issues across the decades and emerged as a healthy, whole person. As a result, she is sensitive to and wise about the human condition, which is one of the many reasons I like her so much. Her comment reminded me of the obvious, that all is not well with our world, or with our own little personal worlds for that matter. Learning to accept the many faces of human brokenness and knowing what to do and think about it are important parts of becoming a mature Christian.

Much of life is riddled with complications and complexities. Friendship, for example, requires vulnerability and openness but also boundaries and freedom. Too much of the former leads to co-dependency and manipulation whereas too much of the latter might signal superficiality. Too much money can spell greed, but too little can provoke resentment and anxiety (Proverbs 30:7-9). Sexuality offers an occasion to give graciously or to take violently, to serve or be served, to exercise self-getting or self-giving, to exploit or to love. Youth is a time of energy, enthusiasm and ignorance, age a time of increasing limits but also growing wisdom. Sin, of course, further compromises friendship, money, sex, age and just about every other area of our lives.

The doctrine of sin reminds us, brutally, that life as we experience it is not the way it is suppose to be. Sin vandalizes or disrupts God's Shalom.¹ At our staff conference, Chris Sugden of the Oxford Center for the Study of Missions reminded us of many examples. When about half the world goes to bed at night with hunger pains, then death has encroached upon life. When a marriage ends in bitterness, recriminations, legal assaults, and manipulative tactics that use children as pawns, then the acrid smell of death can be almost overpowering. When a parent's patience with a wayward teenager wears thin and hope fades, then darkness begins to eclipse light. For the time being, death and life, darkness and light, the old and the new, overlap. Sometimes they intermingle.

In Romans 1:18-27, Paul uses a revealing cluster of words to describe our present condition. Our personal lives, and even all of creation, he says, are characterized by suffering, frustration, bondage, decay, pain, waiting and weakness. The normal human response, he indicates, is to groan—a word he uses three times. All creation groans (8:22), we ourselves groan inwardly (8:23), and even the Spirit of God who intercedes for us groans with inexpressible yearnings as He helps us with our many frailties (8:26). A chapter earlier, after having acknowledged the internal tug of war that he experienced between serving sin and serving God, he cries out in exasperation, “O wretched man that I am!” (7:24).

Paul experienced his wretchedness because he realized that he lived in two worlds at once, in the lifelong struggle between the old man and the new. It was Luther who provided a most helpful and even liberating distinction at this point, that Christians are not perfect, but that even after our conversion, and until the day we die, we are simultaneously both saints and sinners (simul justus et peccator). Paul describes this paradox in his own life: “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being, I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (Romans 7:21-23). Luther describes it this way: “in myself outside of Christ, I am a sinner; in Christ outside of myself, I am not a sinner.” Both of these conditions are true, and the tension and conflict that they produce will remain with us until our dying day.

At this point Christians want to avoid two extremes. On the one hand, we can turn a blind eye and lapse into denial. Despite all the hard evidence (Reinhold Niebuhr once observed that human sin was the most empirically verifiable doctrine of Christianity), in fact this is not too uncommon (1 John 1:10). Some people seem to live with romantic ideals about life, as if the Christian journey might be portrayed by a Currier and Ives post card. On the other hand, Paul does not lapse into despair or fatalism. He does not give up but lives with expectations that although things are not the way they are supposed to be, and they will never be perfect, by God's grace they can change for the good.

Ever the pastor, Luther advises us as follows in his Commentary on Galatians:

We teach and comfort the afflicted sinner after this manner: Brother, it is not possible for you to become so righteous in this life that you should feel no sin at all, that your body should be clear like the sun, without spot or blemish: but you have as yet wrinkles and spots, and yet you are holy notwithstanding. But you will say: How can I be holy, when I have and feel sin in me? I answer: In that you feel and acknowledge your sin, it is a good token: give thanks unto God and despair not. It is one step of health when the sick man acknowledges and confesses his infirmity. But how shall I be delivered from sin? Run to Christ, the physician, who heals them that are broken in heart, and saves sinners. Follow not the judgment of reason, which tells you that God is angry with sinners: but kill reason, and believe in Christ.

One final distinction. In my own Christian experience, when I get overly discouraged about the many manifestations of my sinfulness, it helps me to contrast the short term present with the long term past. At any given moment it can feel like I make very little progress indeed on the journey with Jesus, and discouragement can set in. What is wrong with me?! But in fact, when I consider the long haul, and compare where I am today with where I was 20 years ago, I find it easier to discern and plot what looks like a healthy trajectory toward wholeness and to trace the gracious hand of God in my life.

That over ten million people have taken Prozac for depression is a barometer indicating that much of life for many people is not the way it is supposed to be. That about 70% of these people have gotten better is a salute to Prozac, but even more to the gracious God who knows us in our fallen state and yet nevertheless longs to love and heal us.