Adult ADHD Brought Under Jesus

“I was trying harder and falling farther behind . . . but I had lots of potential.” That is the misery of ADHD in adults. Every day is another surefire opportunity for failure. Guaranteed. You will see it, and someone else will make sure you see it too. “Smart . . . but she never applied herself.” “He knows what to do . . . but never completes anything.” These will be in their obituaries.

There are many sources of information where you can get details and debates about adult ADHD. Here I will propose a few principles and signposts that can guide those who want Jesus to be in and over everything.

After a lifetime of feeling different (in a bad way), the descriptions of ADHD capture your experience and suggest that you are not merely lazy. This, indeed, sounds like very good news. You discover a like-brained tribe that understands from their own experience and offers compassion, along with a few helpful ideas. We tend to understate how pleasant it is to be accurately known.

If you decide to try medication, you will often notice a benefit. Once you settle into it, the benefit will be incremental and perhaps noticeable to you but less so to others. If you do notice it, medication will be like getting eyeglasses for the first time after years of adapting to a blurry world.

Medication will and should lose its place as your primary strategy. Even if medication has a significant benefit, more important to you is that you are released from your old interpretation that you are merely bad, lazy, and shameful. Next up? The most useful work is to find words for your own unique style. For example:

• your attention is scattered and you have difficulty setting priorities,
• the passage of time is a mystery in that ten minutes and three hours feel the same,
• you rely on moderate stress to attend to mundane projects,
• you do not complete larger tasks that last beyond your initial burst of enthusiasm,
• you are a perfectionist who can lose momentum on your projects because they will not quite be what you imagined, and
• you are easily taken off course by thoughts unrelated to the task at hand.

These are possible weaknesses.

Then you will find words for your strengths such as creativity, flexibility, and willingness to give your time to others. For perfectionists, this self-awareness is one task that is supposed to be incomplete as you always refine it and identify what to address first. With your list in hand, you get creative with strategies that can modify your weaknesses and let your strengths shine.

You will eventually notice that credible voices say there is no genetic evidence for ADHD, and they are correct. There is none, at least not yet. That, however, does not mean that there are no brain or physical contributions. If you want to understand how your body and brain contribute to your life, look for thoughts and behaviors that are best described as strengths and weaknesses rather than right or wrong. Right and wrong are the purview of the soul; strengths and weaknesses are the purview of the body. From this perspective, you could say that Scripture itself gives you reason to think of many of the signs of adult ADHD as physical. The actual brain and biological research on ADHD still has much to uncover.

Are there other possible contributions? Absolutely. Try not to get locked into a neurotransmitter-only explanation for ADHD. Also consider allergies, OCD, a chaotic family history, scattered alertness that comes with trauma, an unsettled connection to Jesus Christ, and more. ADHD is an opportunity for a fresh look into matters of body and soul.

In all this, remember that Jesus is more thrilling than insight into adult ADHD. ADHD is a regular feature of every day, so how could it not have some priority in your life? The challenge is this: Jesus is too often partitioned from these matters that rightly occupy you. He is in reserve for a later day. Overhear your conversations, or your inner conversation. Jesus and ADHD rarely meet. This is something to work on.

There is a relevant (and sad) story from Scripture that illustrates what happens when Jesus is not over everything in your life. Though in his earlier days King Asa of Judah was faithful to the Lord, over time he became proud and turned away from him. Even when Asa was afflicted with a disease, he did not relent. In 2 Chronicles 16:12, it says: “In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe. Yet even in his disease he did not seek the LORD, but sought help from physicians.” This story reminds us to talk to the Lord about everything and trust him with all the difficulties of life. When we seek physicians and other aids, we remember that God is over every treatment and strategy. We seek him and trust in him above all else. This does not diminish various treatments; it places Christ in them, over them. He is more than them.

This means that you learn how to pray for his help. What is it that you want him to do? You could pray for ideas and wisdom to stick with a good plan. Then go deeper. What do you want from him that only he can do? In other words, he can use friends and physicians in your life, but what do you truly need that only God can give you? For example, you need forgiveness, hope, confidence in his words, the knowledge of his love (especially when you feel like a burden and failure), his words of encouragement to you when shame makes itself known, and deeper love for others.

Talk about Jesus as much as you talk about ADHD. Get to know him better. J. I. Packer wrote that a relationship with him is “calculated to thrill a person’s soul.”¹ That should be our highest aspiration.

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1. J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Crossway, 2023), 29. ↩︎