God Despite the Mood-Swing Roller Coaster
By Jessica Brodie
One of the hallmarks of adolescence is that whirlwind roller coaster of emotions and mood swings. I know I experienced it as a teen and into my early twenties, and I definitely don’t want to go back to that phase in my life. It felt like constant chaos, like I was trying to walk on sinking sand—euphoric one moment, then devastated the next.
For teens and young adults with mental illness, that roller coaster is even more intense. It’s not just confined to teens, either. Adults well past their younger days and even into their elder years experience that constant up-and-down, sometimes because of a personality disorder and other times because of a chemical imbalance. It’s not their fault, and it’s so painful to watch.
As the mother of a child battling fiercely to overcome mental illness, I speak from experience. I also speak from experience as one who watched numerous family members battle their own mental illness demons. It’s something I’ve witnessed since I was a child, and it is terribly hard, both for the person walking through it and for those of us on the outside, trying to walk alongside them in love and with compassion. There are things they can do that help, from medication and prayer and counseling to exercise, which releases feel-good chemicals like endorphins and serotonin to help with natural mood control.
Still, it is so difficult when you’re the one who’s on that wild ride of feelings, emotions, and moods, particularly with all the questioning that goes on within you. Where is God in all of this? Why does God feel so far away? Why can’t I feel him walking beside me? Does he even care? Why won’t he do anything about this?
I get this. As a writer and a sensitive soul, feelings are incredibly important to me. They are to many of us.
But when we start to ask those questions, when we let that doubt creep in and begin to take control, it’s like we’re willingly hopping on that roller coaster and strapping ourselves in.
God absolutely experiences feelings and emotions. The Bible tells us God feels joy and disappointment, sadness and rage.
But what’s important to understand is that God and God’s existence are not at all dependent upon our feelings.
God is God, the Great I Am, the Lord Almighty, the Alpha and the Omega, the One who created the moon and the water and the stars … and every bit of this is in spite of how we feel.
God is God outside of our own emotions and our ability to sense him, whether his presence or his intimate working in our lives.
That roller coaster of emotion and mood swings goes on and on, but God is the very structure upon which it all rests. He’s the one constant, the single element we can count on when everything else is tenuous and fleeting.
At the end of the day, it does not matter one bit if we can feel him walking beside us or not. We can trust that he is there, regardless of whether we can feel him.
While my daughter is in an extremely good place right now—learning to control her emotions capably and with confidence, learning to understand her triggers, and taking steps in self-care to conquer and overcome all of her mental health battles—I remember very well what it meant to walk on eggshells on a daily basis, wondering what the day would bring and how she would react. And I remember her questions about why God felt so far away.
It’s not just people with mental illness who struggle with this question.
God is God despite our feelings. Our feelings might ebb and flow, crash like thundering waves or soar to the highest of heights. Our feelings might deceive us. One day we might feel good and strong, while other days we might feel weak and at the mercy of so many forces, unable to find our footing.
But we can rest in the certain and unshakable knowledge that God is our firm foundation and so much bigger than our feelings.
Even as our feelings might rise and fall like a roller coaster, God is always there.
Amen, and thanks be to God.
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