Fariza

“The Church is a hospital, and not a courtroom, for souls. She does not condemn on behalf of sins, but grants remission of sins.”

St. John Chrysostom

When people who have struggled with depression are asked to describe what it feels like, they often describe a heavy, dark cloud over their heads that follows them everywhere.

Sometimes, this is what being a Christian can feel like too. The dark cloud is the voice of the enemy, constantly reminding you of your failures, condemning you for every little thing you do wrong, and making you feel as though you can never be good enough. For years, the Protestant Church taught me that I was a wretched sinner who deserved to go to hell. If it weren’t for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, my salvation would have been impossible.

Now, that is technically true because without the Crucifixion and Resurrection, there is no way to eternal life. However, in my Protestant understanding of penal substitutionary atonement, this teaching became too heavy for me to carry, sometimes even unbearable. And because of that, the dark cloud over my faith only seemed to grow bigger.

I walked around feeling personally responsible for Jesus’s death, as though I had put Him there myself. Even though, in some mysterious sense, my sin did put Him there. But…I mean, I didn’t choose to be born into a fallen world and inherit a nature doomed to sin that essentially killed Christ.

And yet, I carried the guilt as if I was the only one responsible for it.

Then I came to Orthodoxy… and my entire world changed.

I finally exhaled.

The heavy cloud that had been following me for years finally dissipated. When the Lord began calling me into the Holy Orthodox faith, it felt like I had finally come home — a place where I could finally feel safe. I have also come to realize and experience something completely new in my walk with Christ. I was introduced to my heavenly family, who had been there this entire time — the Theotokos, the saints, the angels, and all the heavenly hosts who have been praying, loving, and cheering me on as I ran this race, encouraging me to persevere and finish it well no matter how hard it gets.

For the first time, I felt like I wasn’t walking this journey alone.

Walking into Orthodoxy felt like a sick person walking into a hospital. That image of the Church as a hospital, not a courtroom, lifted a dark cloud of condemnation that was over my head for years. The cloud of legalism and a version of the cross I was taught to carry felt like a debt I could never repay.

Once I learned the Orthodox understanding of salvation, everything finally began to make sense. I began to realize that when God sees me, He sees His Son — the righteous Son through whose wounds I have been made righteous. Through Christ, God sees me not according to my sin and failures, but as His beloved creation, being restored into what He intended in Eden.

God sees a sinless version of me because of who Christ is.

I remember hearing an Antiochian priest once explain what St. John Chrysostom meant when he compared the church to a hospital during a Bible study. Honestly, it meant nothing to me back then because it sounded like another cliché I had heard a million times before as a Protestant.

But the more I learned about the Orthodox faith, the more the words of one of the Church’s most beloved Fathers began to make sense. The Church, I learned, is not a courtroom where a righteous judge tallies my crimes and waits for a legal transaction to satisfy His wrath. The Church is a hospital, and we are all patients — every one of us, affected by the same disease, walking through the same doors, looking for the same healing.

I pictured it literally: a sick person arriving at the hospital, waiting to be seen by a doctor. And in that image, the spiritual self-flagellation began to lift slowly. Because think about it: imagine you showed up at a hospital sick, and the doctors and nurses greeted you with contempt, scoffing at you for whatever bad decision led you there; you would never go back.

That’s not how hospitals work.

When you are admitted into the hospital, even if you did something reckless to get there, the staff’s first instinct isn’t to shame you. The staff’s job is to get you the right care as soon as possible. Your experience starts at the reception, where all of your information is collected. Then the nurse checks your pulse and takes your blood pressure. Once that’s done, all of your symptoms are entered into a computer database. That information is then communicated to the doctor, who creates a recovery plan for you, which requires you to check in with him regularly until you are fully healed.

A hospital is a place where help is expected, and not earned.

This is exactly what the Church is supposed to be like. Once you start to see the Church as a hospital, you not only stop judging yourself, but also other people. You begin to realize that sick people don’t have time for judgment because they are preoccupied with whatever disease brings them to the hospital.

Nothing humbles you more than being sick.

When you begin to see the church as a hospital, you start to see the people around you as fellow patients, not rivals or threats. You start to see them as a physician would. But here’s a thing: a hospital doesn’t just admit you and declare you cured on the spot.

Healing is a process.

It is a therapeutic process that restores human nature.

And before we can talk about healing, we have to be honest about how we get sick in the first place. We have to think about how sin actually gets a grip on us in the first place.

How Sin Takes Hold of Your Life

In the Orthodox understanding, sin is a spiritual sickness that affects humanity, wounding our relationship with God, distorting our desires, and slowly taking hold of our heart when we continue to surrender to it. Sin is a sickness that affects us all from the day we are born into this broken world.

Most of the time, our biggest strongholds build slowly until one day we realize we are stuck without knowing exactly how we got there. And if we want real freedom, not just forgiveness in theory, we have to be honest about how that grip actually works.

It usually starts before we are old enough to have any say in it. None of us chose the home we were born into, or the neglect, or the moments as children when we learned how to self-soothe because we didn’t feel safe. Those wounds didn’t just stay in the past; they moved in and shaped our worldview, and determined our decision-making as adults. The very sins we later condemn ourselves for are often just that old wound (trauma) still trying to protect us the only way it knows how.

The body carries just as much weight as the soul does, even though we like to pretend sin only lives in some spiritual compartment untouched by our physiology. A body running on four hours of sleep and whatever food was fastest has very little self-control left to give, because willpower is a muscle and exhausted muscles fail, which is exactly why the Church has always taken fasting and bodily discipline so seriously.

Another way we get stuck in our old habits is by not paying enough attention to the people we surround ourselves with. It is an absolute fact that you do become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. At some point in your life, on a subconscious level, you will end up doing the same things as the people around you, whether it’s good or bad.

This is why you must exercise wisdom when choosing your crowd, because it will determine the trajectory of your entire life.

And it’s ok if it takes time to find the right people in your life. It is better to be alone than surrounded by crappy people. And when I say alone, I don’t mean to isolate yourself. The enemy’s job is to keep you away from people because he knows it is much easier for him to torment your mind. Once he successfully gets hold of your mind, you will turn to whatever brings you the most comfort. And most of the time these “comforts” turn out to be extremely harmful to both your body and soul. When you are isolated, you are more likely to overeat, fall into depression and anxiety, watch things you are not supposed to, use substances, and lose the drive to live and, most importantly, further the kingdom of God.

Of course, there are seasons in people’s lives when God calls them away from the noise and into a solitude with Him. However, He never encourages the average Christian to withdraw from society altogether. Even monks and nuns who live away from the world live in communities.

Here is the truth you need to understand.

There are certain sins in your life that you will not be able to overcome without people. You can isolate, repent all day, fast from all the things that bring you joy, and ask God for deliverance, but it will not happen until you interact with other people. When you try to fight battles completely alone, you set yourself up for failure because isolation is one of sin’s oldest tools. A person cut off from real community has no one left to notice when they start to slip, which is also why isolated people tend to be less healthy and to die younger. The process of sanctification requires the participation of other people in your life. You need a community of people to help you overcome your sinful patterns.

God did not design human beings to live hyper-individualistic, self-centered, and self-serving lives.

Finally, everything you let into your mind — every video, every article, every feed, every voice you give your evening to — makes a small deposit into who you are becoming, whether you notice it or not, because the mind doesn’t separate passive scrolling from active teaching. What you consume long enough, you start to believe, and what you believe, you eventually live.

Put all of that together, and you can see why sin feels less like a single bad decision and more like a current pulling you downstream, which is exactly why fighting it alone rarely works.

How To Start Healing

None of what I’m writing should leave you in despair; it’s meant to make you aware of the reality we all live in and to help you recognize the issue, which is the very first step towards healing. Recognize that you have a problem.

Remember that sin doesn’t just leave, even after God delivers you. It is almost impossible for an average Christian to fully separate ourselves from sin because we continue to live in the world that is infested by sin. This is also why holiness must be maintained daily in small, unglamorous ways when no one sees, like praying when you don’t feel like it, fasting when you want to indulge, and choosing the harder right thing while the easier wrong thing is sitting right there.

Since the grip of sin takes hold in the body just as much as the soul, we must begin fighting it there first. So fix your sleep schedule, fix your diet, and put real boundaries around your phone, because a well-rested, well-fed person has more strength to resist temptation than one running on exhaustion.

Put boundaries around your company. This one is harder to do, because it means looking honestly at people you might genuinely love. Because imagine you have an unhealed wound on your body that is still bleeding, and there is someone in your life whom you are close to who carries a knife. Every time you spend time with them, they take that knife and press it into the very wound that is trying to heal.

I know this is a graphic example, but that is exactly what it can feel like when you surround yourself with people who don’t help you heal, but instead continually trigger your wounds and traumas. Instead of giving those wounds the space and time they need to heal, you keep reopening them — leaving you stuck and falling behind in your healing journey.

Remember, nobody drifts on purpose. It happens one conversation at a time, one bad shared thought about something you relate to, one slightly lowered standard that your body flags because everybody’s standards lowered together.

So, pray and ask God to remove people from your life who are not good for you, and ask Him to replace them with a healthy community.

Not perfect but healthy!

Nobody in Scripture healed alone, and neither should we.

And lastly, guard what you let into your mind, because your life really depends on it. Cut the noise, choose fewer and better sources, and trade some of that scrolling for Scripture, prayer, and silence, even when the silence feels uncomfortable at first.

Learn to sit in silence; it will truly change your life.

None of these steps are life-changing on their own, and none of them will feel like deliverance the day you begin to practice them. Sin took hold gradually, and freedom comes the same way, throught the slow accumulation of small, unglamorous faithful choices that eventually make a huge impact on your spiritual and physical well-being.

The Church never promised us a courtroom where we could plead our case and walk away acquitted, untouched, and unchanged. It promised us a hospital, the real one, with a real diagnosis and a real cure, where healing is so slow, sometimes really painful, and never finished on this side of eternity. But it is offered freely to every one of us, exactly as we are, the moment we walk through the doors of that hospital.

And please remember that sin does not have a final say. It lost its power over us the moment Jesus said, “It is finished.”

Hold on to those words.