“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.“
2 Timothy 1:7
When you’re profoundly depressed issues like taking a hot shower and eating something seem impossible. I’m embarrassed to say I once went 34 days with a shower. I laid in bed pretty much unable to function. I lost 60 lbs.
I suppose that is the insidious truth about chronic depression, I know it well. God seems far, far away. Life doesn’t matter anymore. I am way beyond ‘salvageable.’ I obviously don’t say it, but I feel deep-down like I’m destined for God’s scrap yard of failed souls.
Just a word here about Satan’s battle for our soul.
He’s a boxer who almost always attacks our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. He finds an open cut, and pounds it over and over.
He is evil far beyond human comprehension. His schemes and plots are his attempt to destroy me and to extend his darkness.
Scripture tells us that the devil is conquered. Using God’s weapons (Ephesians 6:10-18) we can protect ourselves from his evil intentions. But that war is still demanding and it’s a real challenge at times. Especially for us.
But yet there is much I can do.
Yes, it’s true–life does seem impossible at times. Depression, if not confronted biblically, will slowly devour us. It deceives and cripples. There is nothing quite like it; some people tell you it will pass, and that you’ll see the sun again, but they don’t get it. Sometimes it seems to be the worst advice ever given.
Please understand that afflicted souls are special to God.
And that alone truly comforts me. It seems like there is an invisible tether that holds from completely dropping off the edge. When I pray–it is often desperate and brief. (More like a quiet scream for help.) There are no frills and no eloquence, but I know I’m being heard by Him who guards my soul.
People, for the most part, don’t always understand and are of little help. I must admit that my own attitude about this can be less than stellar. I want to shout, “unless you have been lost in this particular section of hell yourself, perhaps it’s best if you just shut up.” (I don’t really say this mind you, but I’m terribly tempted to.)
TrytospeakhonestlytotheLordasoftenasyoucan.
Learn to listen to His voice. I read the Psalms–they give me a spiritual ears so that I can hear Him. I find a voice that can speak to God. Reading the Psalms imparts things that I desperately need.
That “sound mind” promised in 2 Timothy 1:7 needs to be believed. You must activate it by faith. Even a faith that falters and is weak. But like a shield, you need to lift it up to defend yourself.
“I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain.”
In early November, I went to California for a writers retreat. There were only four students and the woman leading the retreat. I learned so much and hung out with a few other writers. And yet, the poem below is what I wrote the first night after our opening session.
The next day I read it to one of my new writer friends, a woman who has been on this writing journey for a lot less time than I. She was touched because she had been feeling inadequate and that the rest of us were so much more accomplished than she was.
I love it when God allows me to remember the dark night of the soul in a way that brings cheer and blessing to others.
“The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, ‘O God, forgive me,’ or ‘Help me.'”
Billy Graham
Why so downcast, Oh my soul? I understand the psalmist's plea. Here I am with new friends of gold But feelings of sadness needle me.
Am I just a fraud pretending to be One who has something worthwhile to say? When truth be told, or a lie of old, Never will I point to God's way.
How I feel runs hot and cold; Now I am weak when once I was bold. Powerless and useless are words I hear Echoing deep in my mind as fear.
Wounds that run deep still bleed I know they're not true, never were. But still, still these words Oh Lord. You are the truth, the life, the way.
O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you. 2 Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! 3 For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am a man who has no strength, 5 like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. 6 You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep.
Psalm 88:1-6, ESV
I definitely needed this Psalm today. Yesterday I went to the doctor and was blindsided by news that really isn’t good, at all. Of course, I also have this ongoing struggle with depression. Today I feel like I’m running a marathon with ‘leg weights’ on.
This particular Psalm is radically different than the others.
This Psalm has no kind words, and no praise to God for deliverance. It is a singularly sad song. Imagine if you will, a huge stone fortress in the mountains. Every room has a door, and every room a window. All except one. No light enters this room. There is no entrance or exit, no way to get free. Psalm 88 describes living that torturous experience.
I like my Psalms to be strengthening or encouraging.
But then comes this one! Life unravels and frays. Everything gets confusing. Life comes apart. The thought of being one who is irretrievably lost and damned, it saturates my thinking. The despair is beyond belief, I have no words to describe its special variety of darkness.
Anyone who has walked into this hell will understand.
Am I ‘less’ a Christian because of this vicious despair? Some would say so. The writer in verse 1-2, calls out to God. (I guess this what you are supposed to do). There is a sense of consistency in his cry. In verses 3-5, we see him evaluating his position. Again, there is a underground current of despair.
There is simply no help, no deliverance for him.
It’s a bitter and painful place to be. There are no explanations why life has gotten so nasty and bitter and out-of-control. But one thing that Psalm 88 does quite well, it strips you of any dignity that you have left.
(Does this make any sense at all?)
There is so much embedded in the book of Psalms. Comfort, faith, victory and hope are what we find. But in Ps. 88, we find a black pearl, the only one of its kind. Somehow, we dare not leave it behind, just because we don’t understand it.
I’m convinced that it has tremendous power to the disciple who is in endless pain. Just vocalizing this Psalm does something to us. These real words help. This Psalm is ours.
“Lord Jesus Christ, you are for me medicine when I am sick; you are my strength when I need help; you are life itself when I fear death; you are the way when I long for heaven; you are light when all is dark; you are my food when I need nourishment.”
Our theology makes all the difference in fighting depression, writes Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Author of “Darkness, Is My Only Companion” and Episcopal priest.
Here is an excerpt where she introduces the depression of Christians:
In his Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis says that suffering is uniquely difficult for the Christian, for the one who believes in a good God. If there were no good God to factor into the equation, suffering would still be painful, and ultimately meaningless.
For the Christian, who believes in the crucified and risen Messiah, suffering is always meaningful. It is meaningful because of the one in whose suffering we participate, Jesus. This is neither to say, of course, that suffering will be pleasant, nor that it should be sought. Rather, in the personal suffering of the Christian, one finds a correlate in Christ’s suffering, which gathers up our tears and calms our sorrows and points us toward his resurrection.
In the midst of a major mental illness, we are often unable to sense the presence of God at all. Sometimes all we can feel is the complete absence of God, utter abandonment by God, the sheer ridiculousness of the very notion of a loving and merciful God. This cuts to the very heart of the Christian and challenges everything we believe about the world and ourselves.
I have a chronic mental illness, a brain disorder that used to be called manic depression, but now is less offensively called bipolar disorder. I have sought help from psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health professionals; one is a Christian, but most of my helpers are not. I have been in active therapy with a succession of therapists over many years, and have been prescribed many psychiatric medications, most of which brought quite unpleasant side effects, and only a few of which relieved my symptoms. I have been hospitalized during the worst times and given electroconvulsive therapy treatments.
All of this has helped, I must say, despite my disinclination toward medicine and hospitals. They have helped me to rebuild some of “myself,” so that I can continue to be the kind of mother, priest, and writer I believe God wants me to be.
During these bouts of illness, I would often ask myself: How could I, as a faithful Christian, be undergoing such torture of the soul? And how could I say that such torture has nothing to do with God? This is, of course, the assumption of the psychiatric guild in general, where faith in God is often viewed at best as a crutch, and at worst as a symptom of disease.
How could I, as a Christian, indeed as a theologian of the church, understand anything in my life as though it were separate from God? This is clearly impossible. And yet how could I confess my faith in that God who was “an ever-present help in trouble” (Ps. 46:1) when I felt entirely abandoned by that God? And if this torture did have something to do with God, was it punishment, wrath, or chastisement? Was I, to use a phrase of Jonathan Edwards’s, simply a “sinner in the hands of an angry God”?
I started my journey into the world of mental illness with a postpartum depression after the birth of our second child. News outlets are rife with stories of women who destroy their own children soon after giving birth. It is absolutely tragic. Usually every instinct in the mother pushes toward preserving the life of the infant. Most mothers would give their own lives to protect their babies. But in postpartum depression, reality is so bent that that instinct is blocked. Women who would otherwise be loving mothers have their confidence shaken by painful thoughts and feelings.
Depression is not just sadness or sorrow.
When I am depressed, every thought, every breath, every conscious moment hurts.
And often the opposite is the case when I am hypomanic: I am scintillating both to myself, and, in my imagination, to the whole world. But mania is more than speeding mentally, more than euphoria, more than creative genius at work. Sometimes, when it tips into full-blown psychosis, it can be terrifying. The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off or pull out of it: there is no pulling oneself “up by the bootstraps.”
And yet the Christian faith has a word of real hope, especially for those who suffer mentally. Hope is found in the risen Christ. Suffering is not eliminated by his resurrection, but transformed by it. Christ’s resurrection kills even the power of death, and promises that God will wipe away every tear on that final day.
But we still have tears in the present.
We still die. In God’s future, however, death itself will die. The tree from which Adam and Eve took the fruit of their sin and death becomes the cross that gives us life.
The hope of the Resurrection is not just optimism, but keeps the Christian facing ever toward the future, not merely dwelling in the present. But the Christian hope is not only for the individual Christian, nor for the church itself, but for all of Creation, bound in decay by that first sin: “Cursed is the ground because of you … It will produce thorns and thistles for you …” (Gen. 3:17-18).
This curse of the very ground and its increase will be turned around at the Resurrection. All Creation will be redeemed from pain and woe. In my bouts with mental illness, this understanding of Christian hope gives comfort and encouragement, even if no relief from symptoms. Sorrowing and sighing will be no more. Tears will be wiped away. Even fractious [unruly, irritable] brains will be restored.
“Darkness: My Only Companion”
Kathryn Greene-McCreightis assistant priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church in New Haven, Connecticut, and author of Darkness Is My Only Copanion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos Press, 2006).
Broken Believers 