The best illustration I ever received in describing the physical nature of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) was from Elizabeth Baker, who happens to be my dear grandmother-in-law as well as a valued mentor and teacher.

She described the human mind as a fishing net through which thoughts pass; thoughts were represented as varying degrees of gravel, sand, etc. Sand represents fleeting thoughts. Then you have pea gravel, small rocks, large rocks, and ultimately boulders. In a normally functioning mind, only the boulders get really “stuck” and need help being removed.

Then she described the OCD mind very succinctly: the net is too tight.

What a fantastic illustration! Having a spiritual nature, all humans must at some point battle removing the obstacles of the mind; Christians in particular have a pressing motivation for removing the objects that we don’t want to keep. Now, imagine for a moment that a Christian has OCD. Without divine intervention, the mesh in the defective net isn’t going to get enlarged; however, we still need to work spiritually at removing the obstacles, right?

The problem arises because so much more gets caught in the mind of an OCD believer. As Christians, we know that we have become a new creature in Christ, and as such, we are much disturbed by the things that are getting caught in our nets. The enemy fights dirty! He attacks us where we are weakest. For an OCD believer, the assaults of the evil one are particularly painful because not only can we not control the obsessions or compulsions that enter our mind, but we become distressed by the fact that we cannot rid ourselves of them. No amount of logic will deter the obsessions held in an OCD mind; we are fully aware that our obsessions are irrational.

For the believer, this is most distressing. We are admonished by scripture to cast our cares upon the Lord, and here we are: held in helpless captivity by our cares. This, of course, is precisely what the enemy wants. Not only can he attack us by causing us to be anxious, even limiting our ability to function at times, but now he is provided with an almost limitless source of shame with which to taunt us.

At one point in my battle against OCD, it was liberating to recognize that my OCD and the resulting exacerbation of my panic attacks (the body’s response to an adrenaline switch stuck in the “ON” position) was, in a great way, the product of my fallible human body. When I became able to separate my OCD from my panic attacks, and furthermore the physical aspect of my OCD from the spiritual aspect of the fears that were getting stuck in the first place, I felt as though the battle had been won.

However, this stage in my spiritual walk is completely different. This new frontal assault on my OCD, I feel, has been a direct result of the building up of spiritual strongholds. I allowed myself to become spiritually parched — unwatered, and unfed. I nurtured tiny sins that blossomed into full grown trees of spiritual captivity. By not being vigilant, I had opened myself up for spiritual attack. In my position of weakness, my faith became the perfect target, and my OCD the perfect vehicle to carry the fiery darts.

Now every day, every moment, is a fight. Every day the Lord is opening my eyes to areas of my spiritual hedge that I have allowed to become weak, areas of my life that I have allowed to stagnate or even fester. Every moment is an act of pure will to survive, to recover the spoils that the enemy has claimed. I am hanging onto the Lord in a way that I would never have imagined — when, as C.S. Lewis said, I look all around me to discover all traces of the Lord’s presence gone from me, and still choose to obey Him. This month has been a moment by moment battle in sweat and grit and tears, a focusing of my mind like a laser in order to allow no room for the OCD.

There’s where the clincher comes in: my physical body, and its weakness, are affecting my spiritual walk. I made a difficult decision today — I allowed the provision for an escape valve.

Those of you who know me personally know that I have a personal aversion to psychotropic medications. In fact, I rather dislike any pharmaceutical medication. Of course I recognize their uses and vital necessity in the saving of many lives, but I also hate to use them myself. It’s a personal opinion, perhaps weakness, of mine. So, even the consideration of having an escape valve in the form of a pill was abhorrent to me.

I wrestled back and forth with it. In taking something in the heat of a debilitating panic attack, would I simply be ignoring my mind? Would I be avoiding a spiritual battle that needed to be sweated out? Or was my avoidance of medication ruining my ability to function so that I could not move ahead spiritually?

The biggest obstacle in this phase of my battle has been “trying to figure it out.” I want to rationalize it, label it, box it in, and squish it. I want to gain peace by understanding, and understanding by the work of logic. I am fighting against the Holy Spirit with the concept that I cannot, will not ever be able to, have no hope of ever answering the riddles that plague me. Worst of all, I recognize that the faith that will quench these fiery darts is not something that I can work up within myself, or just try harder to obtain and thereby succeed.

It was then that I came to my conclusion. By allowing myself an escape valve, it was an act of proclamation. It was, in a sense, my decree that when, after fighting and sweating and doing all that is within me to battle against my OCD, it becomes a giant so huge that it starts to take over my body, and I begin to panic so that I cannot think, cannot breathe, cannot function, and feel that I cannot live, that I have the choice to say this:

“I have a disease. This disease causes me to be weak. You are attacking my weakness. I am tired of wrestling with you. I am tired of trying to rationalize you and figure you out. I don’t care if you’re right or not. You can be right. I am going to exercise my faith based on God’s word, not how I feel or how I cannot rationalize or understand. Therefore, I am choosing not to listen to you any more. By the grace of God, you can be right all you want to — I’m not listening to you any more. I’m going to rest now.”

I have not yet had to take the medicine, which is a very mild, non-habit-forming sedative prescribed to me by a trusted physician who is a mature believer in Christ. Just knowing that I have the the “out” has been enough. It is my own weapon, as if to say, “Fine. Go ahead. Taunt me. But just know this: you aren’t going to win.”

Do I think the battle is over? With a certainty, NO. Not even close. But for this day I have been given strength — and that is all that has ever been needed.