OCD: A House on Fire

Imagine you are standing inside a house that is burning down. Fire rages around you, climbing walls and roof and floor. What do you do?

You do whatever you must to keep the house from utter destruction. You sound the alarm. You evacuate the house. You call the fire department and you ensure that the house is doused with water. Anything to put out the flames. Because if you don’t, the flames will consume the house, and they will consume you with it.

That’s what it feels like to have OCD.

Now imagine that same scenario of standing within those crumbling, burning walls, but you’re doing nothing. You’re simply standing there, watching the flames, not lifting a finger to put them out.

Your eyes see the flames, your body feels the heat, your nose smells the burning house. But you tell yourself that you are not in danger, and there is no fire. Or, maybe there is a fire; you can’t really be sure. But either way, you’re going to be okay. It will not consume you.

That’s what it feels like to battle OCD.

In his book A Quiet Mind to Suffer With, John Andrew Bryant characterizes OCD as “the Siren,” describing the urgent feel of intrusive thoughts and the pull to pay attention to them. As he shares about his own journey with OCD, he writes, “The Siren has not gone. It is only our relationship that has changed.”¹ I think this is a very helpful picture of growth. Our ultimate hope is not in the removal of OCD—though we can, indeed, pray and hope for that. But our ultimate and realistic hope is that we can have a changed relationship to it.

Our hope is that one day—each day, and again the next day—we are able to grow in standing in the middle of that house and doing nothing. To watch the flames with indifference, not necessarily because the intrusive thoughts have gone away or quieted, but because whether or not they’re there, our hope was never in our ability to put out the fire, to stamp down the thoughts. Nothing we did never helped, anyway; we tried various compulsions to quiet the thoughts and ease the anxiety, but anything we did just made them rage all the more. We can no longer depend on our own efforts.

Scrupulosity is going to cause you to doubt your standing with God all the time. It’s not always a raging fire; sometimes it’s merely a smoke alarming blaring. There comes a point where you have to say, “I am going to have the faith that I am okay.” Not because you’re certain that you’re okay, but because you know that the things Jesus promises are truer than your thoughts and feelings. And then you go about your day, acting as if you are okay even when you do not feel okay.

But how do you know you’re okay? Well, you don’t know! And that’s why fighting OCD is so hard. In a sense, the way out is to give up fighting, to give up needing to know for sure. But we do know certain things are true about the Lord. And at the end of the day, we don’t want to bank our hopes anywhere else. I love how John Bunyan describes this in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.²

I must continue on and stake my eternal state with Jesus Christ, whether I have comfort here or not. If God does not come in to comfort me, I thought, I will leap off the ladder, even blindfolded, into eternity—sink or swim, come heaven or hell. Lord Jesus, if You will catch me, do so; if not, I will still risk all for Your name.

This quote beautifully captures what it means to depend on Christ’s mercy and power. Here is a man who had great doubts and fears about his standing with God. He only began to find rest from the constant churn of condemnatory thoughts when he came to the end of his own efforts to keep himself safe. There is freedom found when we are able to say, I cannot attain certainty for myself. Nothing I’ve done or can do will ease this anxiety. But I will cast myself upon my Keeper who has promised that he will never turn away any who come to him (John 6:37).

Yes, the flames still rage. You still see them, hear them, smell them, feel them. But that is scrupulosity speaking, and scrupulosity is never a reliable indicator of reality. Our God has promised that nothing can separate us from his love. We may be utterly convinced that we are a lost cause, but he is utterly abounding in grace. And this promise remains true no matter what we see or feel.

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1. John Andrew Bryant, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With  ↩︎
2. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners ↩︎