How to Be Indebted to Friends
The inevitable state we find ourselves in
As I write about in On Getting Out of Bed, one of the hardest realities I had to wrestle with while going through a particularly dark period of mental affliction was that I had to rely on the love and support of friends. Not just the occasional phone call or visit. But daily calls. Calls in the middle of the day because I was panicking. Constant text messages. And not just one friend, but multiple friends carried this load for years. Now that I’m on this side of treatment and I know more about OCD, I know that most of this was actually harmful to my recovery because it was “reassurance” that just reinforced the doubts in my mind. But at the time, I didn’t really know better. I was just trying to survive. Those friends went on to walk with me through many other serious moments of struggle (that weren’t reassurance-giving) and support, sacrificing considerable time and energy to help pull me together. I can’t really convey to you how much they gave of themselves in time (and therefore money) and convenience to get me the help I needed. It’s a personal story, so I won’t go into those details. All I want to convey is that sometimes in life this is what happens. We find ourselves deeply indebted to others in ways which we fundamentally cannot repay. I’m not the only one. Lots of us have depended on friends to sit with them through anxiety, support them financially, pray for them through trouble, care for their children, give them advice, bail them out of trouble, talk to them through heartache, confront them with sin, and so on. Which raises the question, How do we live with this debt?
