Ben Suggs’s Reviews > A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ > Status Update

“When we perceive Christ has gone silent, that He is no longer working within paradigms we had heretofore understood or shook hands and agreed on when we became Christians, it is not because Christ has left but because He has drawn near. He is nearer than what can be thought or felt…Which is why a life with Christ can be so unexpected and so painful. Who can bear to have Christ as near as the deepest lie?”

Truly a beautifully accurate and tragic description of what OCD is like.

"I had used thoughts as a drug...life did not feel right, life simply was not okay, life simply could not be tolerated unless I was thinking. Every problem in my life, everything I met, was an occasion for and was to be managed by Ceaseless Cognition. Every bad and confusing thing was a reason to think more."

“I could not escape History and Affliction, and Jesus was not the escape of History and Affliction, but by Word, Spirit, and fellowship He was the enduring, the bearing, the overturning of them.”

I have a feeling this book will wreck me

“Calling this illness What's Wrong may sound like a harsh way of putting it…When it is a Bully, I have to fight it. But when it's What's Wrong, then it's just a vulnerability I take care of. I go from fighting and hiding it to quietly, patiently leading it. I can offer myself to the brain that I have rather than hate my brain for not being what I wanted.”