Have you ever felt like you're slowly turning from a believer into an unbeliever? I don't want that to happen, but the longer I'm around, this disease is trying to rob me of every good thing I've had, and it seems like God won't listen, and I'm getting frustrated and plain mad at Him for allowing this to happen and not explaining it to me. Am I a devil? I hope not! Am I falling away? I hope not! I don't want to suffer eternally with a confused mind in hell, with bipolar on top of it all. I want Him to have mercy on me! Yes, I've rebelled and sinned against Him. But haven't we all? And sometimes you find yourself in a trap where getting out of sin requires God's divine help. But all I know is everything I do seems to be displeasing to God, and He has not helped me so far in understanding this disorder. I'm doing my level best to be good, but I'm losing my inspiration and desire to do good, and my faith is dying. Someone please help
I suffer from bipolar schizoaffective
I'm bipolar, and have been diagnosed for around 6 months now. I know how you feel. Don't worry, you're not a devil.
However I've started looking at it a little differently now with the diagnosis of being bipolar, and it's helped me understand a bit more about God.
During the highs it's really easy to do stuff that is wrong, because of the lack of limits in the feeling etc. It is also often a problem because I often forget about spending time with God (so focused on other things) or when I do spend time with Him I loose concentration very easily due to the racing throughts.
During the negative times it can be hard to go to God, because we feel so worthless and such a mess, and so He won't care about us.
Due to the bipolar it also makes things worse, as we go through cycles where the same thing happens again and again. We're not improving in our walk with God, and are just failures. Other people get better and get closer to God, but we can't...
However I've been beginning to see something different, even though the situation is the same. It (in a sense) DOESN'T matter! God still loves us, even when we don't spend time with Him. He wants it, but He also understands our weakness. He won't send us to hell because we had these problems where we messed up. We are applying our own version of love, which depends on doing good stuff to get good stuff back.
I'm not saying we don't care or stop trying to work on our relationship with Him... but it is not the end when we mess up or feel it's pointless. The pointless feeling might be due to the bipolar. So sometimes it's (as in other parts of life) about ignoring the feelings, as they can sometimes be very wrong.
But it is hard. I question if I am a christian quite often. I just have to trust God knows the answer. The feelings are not there at the moment. But then again the feelings are often completely wrong, as I see in my reactions to things (feeling sad when good things happen, overreactions to things etc).
The other thing I find helps a little is that in a way the bipolar helps me focus more on God sometimes. If this life is all there is then it is pretty rubbish a lot of the time! So I can only hope there is better in the long term in a relationship with God. If it's just me then it's a mess.
(I hope this doesn't make it seem like I have a good relationship with God, in many ways I don't. But these are the things I am clinging to.)
