Alan Noble, associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Christ and Pop Culture, examines “the gift and burden of life,” and how Christianity can support mental health, in his new book, On Getting out of Bed (IVP, Apr.).
It’s “a personal reflection on living with mental suffering,” according to Ethan McCarthy, associate editor at IVP. “For all the advances in therapy and psychiatry we’ve seen in recent years, mental suffering remains a constant feature of modern life. Alan says that the choice to live is itself a powerful witness to the goodness of life—even when it doesn’t seem good.”
Noble explains that the book is not a memoir, though it’s based on his challenges with depression and anxiety. “I’ve had to learn to radically trust God and trust God through other people who come alongside me and tell me that life is good and beautiful and worth living,” he says, “and that it’s important for me to get up and love my family and go to work and take care of myself, even when I don’t feel like it.”
How did you come up with the book’s title?
The challenge of getting out of bed is really the challenge of choosing to live. The argument of the book is that life itself is both a burden and a gift. Life is very hard, and we don’t acknowledge that enough. Whether you have a diagnosed mental illness or not, life is difficult. But part of that burden is making the choice to get out of bed, to live, which is also a gift, because God gives us life.
You talk about mental illness as an “everyday experience.” What do you mean by that?
So often by “mental health” we mean a diagnosed or at least diagnosable mental illness. But both the person who has a diagnosed condition and the person who doesn’t are going to face moments of mental suffering. Whether it’s diagnosed or not, you have to know how to cope, how to get up, how to keep moving, how and why to keep living, despite suffering.
How do you see Christianity as a source of mental health support?
God didn’t need to create us. We were created just for God’s good pleasure. Life understood that way is a gift. When we experience mental suffering and despair, we have this grounding, this acknowledgement that even though we are suffering, there’s a deeper reality to the world—that we are known, loved, created, and sustained by God. That doesn’t make the pain, the anxiety, or the depression go away. But what I hope it does is it equips us to persevere.
How does “love your neighbor” fit into your faith-based understanding of mental health?
Christians have this obligation to love our neighbors. So even when we don’t feel like our lives are valuable, meaningful, rich, and fulfilling, we have a duty to our neighbor to get up and keep going because when we do that, we communicate to our neighbor that their lives are a blessing and a gift from God. One of the ways that people suffer is a loss of purpose and meaning. When you realize that part of your purpose is to love your neighbor by getting up and continuing through life, it can be a great source of hope.
