Listen to the Smoke Detectors of Your Heart

BP11

How often do we hear about people dying in their sleep? A deadly murderer creeps into their room and smothers them. Not with their pillow. No, with a cloud of smoke that infiltrates and suffocates their lungs. These people go to bed with cozy thoughts but are unaware that they will never open their eyes again because of a fire in their house.

The common denominator underlying most fire deaths is the lack of a working smoke detector or the absence of any detectors at all. It has been estimated that 3 out of 5 fire deaths occur in these homes.

Another sad statistic is that in houses where fire fatalities occurred, 50% of these structures had smoke detectors that did not respond because they either had no batteries or they were disconnected—sometimes because the residents were fed up with the alarms sounding for other reasons than smoke.

For example, the smoke detectors may have been triggered by pizza baking in the oven or even by aerosol sprays. Out of frustration, the residents of the house disabled them.

So, what can you learn from these tragic deaths due to non-functioning smoke detectors or even the absence of such warning devices in the house?

Always remember four things: Install, maintain, recognize and respond.

First of all, install smoke alarms and place them in the correct locations. Half of all fire deaths at home occur between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. when most people are sleeping and unaware of the silent killer. So be sure to install alarms inside every bedroom where the door is usually closed as well as outside all sleeping areas so that smoke from a fire will not overcome you while you sleep.

Also, install an alarm on every level of the house including the basement and in or near the kitchen.

Secondly, maintain these alarms by ensuring that they have not ceased functioning due to their age or to poor batteries. Replace smoke alarms at least every ten years and switch out the batteries at least once a year–twice if you wish to err on the side of caution.

Thirdly, teach everyone in your house to recognize the sound of a smoke alarm so they will not dismiss it as the dryer buzzer or a phone alarm.

Lastly, respond immediately to the sound of the alarm. It is a messenger installed in your home to potentially save your life.

I mentioned earlier that some people disable their smoke detectors because the devices can be obnoxious and occasionally are triggered by things other than smoke. In other words, some people view the smoke alarm as the problem. They ignore it or make its warning sound go away.

People often do the same with mental illness.

They view mental illness as the problem when it may actually be an alarm alerting you to the real problem. Mental illness is often like the red light on your automobile instrument panel that alerts you that something is wrong with your engine.

The shrieking of the smoke detector, the warning light on your car and mental illness all are alarms crying out for your attention. They are announcing that something is amiss.

You may have heard the slogan that “smoke alarms save lives,” but did you know that mental illness can save lives as well?

Some of you might reply, What! Mental Illness saves lives? No, I believe that mental illness ruins lives and even takes lives. Mental illness is a bad thing, not a good thing.

In many ways, this response is correct. Mental illness is a bad thing because it involves great suffering and can be the result of severe brokenness in the physical body, especially in the brain and the domain of the neurotransmitters.

However, mental illness may also be a messenger as loud and obnoxious as a smoke detector alarm that is designed to save you. (Don’t miss the word designed.) Sent to save you kind of like the fish that swallowed Jonah.

Mental illness is the smoke alarm, as it were, and it’s indicating that there’s a fire somewhere inside of you. So, yes, mental illness is a problem, but it’s not the problem. It’s your personal alarm telling you that there’s an interior problem.

We often see symptoms of mental illness as the problem and fail to hear the important message it’s sending.

Always, mental illness is telling us that something is not right. Sometimes, it’s telling you that there’s a physical problem in your body that needs to be addressed with medications or some other type of treatment. Often, it’s an alarm shouting at us that something is amiss on a psychological, spiritual and relational level.

What isn’t right?

As was mentioned in an earlier post, we were created for a loving friendship with the One who created us. But if we ignore the alarm in our heart and never come to know Jesus, or if we install that relationship in our lives but don’t maintain it, our lives will be filled with PSR (psycho-spiritual-relational) smoke.

Presence is lost and symptoms appear that tell us we’re on our own.

Did you know that most anxiety (from panic to separation to obsessions) is a smoke alarm warning us that we’re alone in the universe?

Most mental illness is the red light on the instrument panel of our souls. It announces that our experience of Presence with Jesus, others and even our own self is absent or being smothered by something. Even if you’ve given your life to Jesus, anxiety can persist as a warning sign that you need to deal with something inside—shame, an unforgiving heart, jealousy, some hidden sin–that is isolating you.

Picture yourself as a house with many rooms. You have closets, a basement and a musty attic in the house of your soul where you hide things. You don’t want Jesus and maybe anyone else to enter those areas. You shut Jesus out and experience the loss of His Presence in those rooms. You’re all alone there.

The smoke alarm of mental illness—anxiety–is triggered because something is wrong in your house. You can silence it or listen to the message of aloneness and separation.

In the end, all mental illness is about separation from God, others and self.

There’s so much that can be said about interruptions in Presence or absence of Presence. Presence can be impacted by the fires outside of you like abuse, the failure of others to pursue you, neglect, and even emotional bankruptcy in those who are supposed to love you.

Most of all, however, a lack of the Presence of God and others in your life is a result of your choices: pride and rebellion against authority; a desire to pursue something to give you happiness instead of someone; and coping skills you have chosen to deal with the anger, sadness, loneliness, and grief of life that only serve to isolate you from all relationships.

Self-protection is potentially one of the most damaging sins.

In this blog 11, I simply want you to ponder the thought that sometimes you might be so quick to pull the mental illness smoke detector off the wall and hide it under your pillow that you don’t listen to what the symptoms are saying.

Again, mental illness is rarely the problem. It is the smoke alarm warning us that something is wrong, but we fail to hear the message—or we don’t want to hear what it is saying. We want the obnoxious alarm to go away so we get on medications, find ways to self-medicate or simply ignore the sound of the alarm.

One faulty belief around mental illness is that the goal of counseling and any other therapeutic intervention such as medication should be to make the symptoms, the discomfort and the pain go away so we can live our lives without the major distractions of mental illness.

However, have you ever thought that your mental illness—anxiety, depression, OCD, personality disorders, eating disorders, bipolar, adjustment disorders—might be a messenger speaking to you that a fire is raging inside your heart? If this is true, then the goal is not to turn off the smoke alarm and go back to bed and sleep away your problems, but to pay attention to the alarm and search the house of your heart to see where the fire is.

Is the smoke of your anxiety warning you that there’s a fire in the bedroom closet? Could the fire be your habit of being offended so easily that you’re quick to burn all your bridges with God and others when they hurt you?

Could the smoke of your depression be warning you that there’s a fire in the basement behind the furnace? Is the fire telling you that you’re so quick to sexualize your relationships because something in your heart is blocking your ability to practice deep emotional intimacy?

Is the smoke of your eating disorder alerting you to the fire of your perfectionism that has become so engulfing that there’s no room left inside of you to love others or even think about their needs?

Remember, life at its core is only about relationships. And mental illness is a smoke detector warning you that there’s a breakdown in your intimacy with others. Distance, alienation, aloneness, rage, and using others exist where love and closeness were designed to be.

Don’t forget, mental illness is a form of Leakage (or maybe even the Volcano). If your heart can’t be expressed through the transparent and honest shaft of the Well, it will come out sideways through the Leakage of mental illness.

If you hide in any way from the God who designed you for Presence and healthy intimacy, the smoke detector of your interior world will shriek. It will warn you that something is terribly wrong and that unless you seek God to correct it, you may miss the whole reason you’re here on this planet.

So, install the detectors if you don’t have any, or check the batteries of those you have. Be aware if you’ve disabled the detectors or torn them off the wall of your heart. You absolutely must hear the alarms when they sound.

Mental illness is one of those alarms. So, don’t muffle or totally turn off the warning alarm of mental illness with meds, self-medicating or distractions. Listen and you will hear how to respond to the Leakage of your heart. For life and love.

Mental illness may be your severe mercy.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world ~ C. S. Lewis