Insanity, or a 'mental breakdown' is not usually as sudden or dramatic as the name implies. People aren't sane one minute and insane the next.
We are all becoming more sane or more insane every day. Each time we face something that is hard to accept, we can react in fear (fear of failure, fear of death, fear of what people think, fear of being alone, etc.) or we can react in faith (faith that God's love will help us to overcome the difficulty).
Fear and faith are both spiritual forces; they each open up a different spiritual world.
Most of us living in the affluent West have so many comforts and amusements that we can go through life with little thought about spiritual things. Neither fear nor faith seem to dominate our lives. For such people, the material world is the real and only world.
But for those few who encounter serious traumas, very powerful emotional reactions can force them out of this material world and into one of two spiritual worlds, both of which are far more real than the one the average Australian knows.
In both of these spiritual worlds the visitor can see clearly the blindness of people living in the material world. But, unfortunately, those who are controlled by fear only become more fearful (paranoid) when they receive this revelation. Pride (i.e. fear of what people think) deceives the fear-ers into thinking that they know more than they do. Dishonesty can then make these people try to cover up their own human-ness by boasting of superhuman powers or historic greatness. This is called a delusion of grandeur.
This new world of fear is insanity (or hell) and for the visitor, escape is very difficult.
People back in the material world argue that what people with breakdowns have experienced is all a product of their imagination. Yet, even in their most honest and humble moments people with breakdowns know that they have discovered something of immense importance. How can they believe people who accuse them of being deluded when they can see more clearly than they have ever seen before that the whole world is deluded?
Nevertheless, the journey from insanity to sanity must take the fear-er back through the material world, where they must face the fears that caused the problem in the first place... because the material world is a part of total reality. It takes a great deal of faith, humility, and honesty to do this, but it can bring you through to the other side, where faith opens up a new beautiful spiritual existence that is called the kingdom of heaven.
That is our discovery through the faith and humility of Christ.
(See also Reprobate Minds.)
Register or log in to take the quiz for this article
