(Receive our blog posts in your email by clicking here. If the author links in this post are broken, please visit our Free PDF Library and click on the author’s page directly.)
The noted Presbyterian preacher and homiletics professor Andrew Watterson Blackwood (1882-1966) was a tireless worker for Christ. But twice in his life he was sidelined by “nervous breakdowns,” the first of which occurred while he was studying at Princeton. Later in life, he wrote an account of the lessons learned from those experiences. It appears in Jay E. Adams, The Homiletical Innovations of Andrew W. Blackwood, pp. 42-43.
HOW CHRIST ENABLES ME TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS
In 1905 I suffered a nervous and physical breakdown, which lasted almost a year. In 1936 I had another breakdown, much worse, which kept me from teaching and preaching for a year and a half. Partly through a kind physician who loved the Lord, I regained health and strength of body and mind. During the past 18 years the Lord has enabled me to carry a full-time load as a professor, to conduct divine services almost every Lord’s Day in the past few years, and to write 18 books, 15 of them for ministers, and all 15 still on the active list. Now I am four years beyond the seminary’s age of retirement, and still He gives me work to do, with strength to do it, day by day, and peace of heart.
So I gladly accept an invitation to testify, not in a spirit of boastfulness, but of gratitude. As our late friend and neighbor Albert Einstein once told Mrs. Blackwood, with reference to his work in science, “I have nothing but what I have received.” He was thinking about greatness in the eyes of men; I am giving thanks for goodness from the hand of God….
…Gradually the Lord has taught me how to live from day to day, as ever in His sight. He has been teaching me what I should have learned as a young minister. Once I asked an older man, active and honored in state and church, “How is it that in a day, a year, or a lifetime you can do more work and better work than any person I have ever known?” He smiled as he told me, “My Lord taught me a long while ago to live without worry, work without hurry, and look forward without fear.” That sounds like Philippians 4:6, 7.
Looking back, I can see that apart from physical causes my breakdowns came from my shortcomings and failures, due no doubt to ambition. I had not learned to live and work and hope in the spirit of my older friend. Neither had I gained mastery over despondency, insomnia, and related disorders, which ought to have no place in a life where the Spirit dwells. I had not even learned how to deal with my body as my father, a horse-and-buggy doctor, took care of his team, and as I, a typical Scotsman, try to take care of my automobile. I do not mean that I ever drank, or abused my body in various other ways, but that I suffered from stress and strain, self-imposed, with resulting worry and waste. Friction in my soul!
Now as I look forward the sunset years I trust that I shall keep on learning how to live day by day, as ever in His sight. With Paul I hope that I shall always feel able to say, “for me to live is Christ”; and with Browning, “The best part is yet to be.” “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood .and righteousness.” Hence I look forward to the unseen world with peace, with hope, and with more than a few foretastes of heaven’s joy. I hope, too, that I shall not meet my Lord with empty hands and a broken heart.
