Tag: depression

Growth in the Troughs of Life

This post has been floating around in my head for almost two weeks now, and I had fully intended to post it here at Broken Believers last weekend, but just didn’t get it done. In retrospect, learning of the great trough our dear brother Bryan is going through, I realize that either I should have made the time or the timing of posting it today is part of God’s design. All I know for sure is that it needs to be posted.

I recently purchased a new book titled The Soul of C.S. Lewis that consists of one-page reflections on various quotes from many of Lewis’ best-loved writings followed by a Bible verse. The book has 10 different contributing authors, and each essay is not attributed to an individual author, but they are all wonderful. Today I want to share a little about one of those essays, along with my own thoughts on the topic at hand.

The Lewis quote that begins the essay is from The Screwtape Letters, one of my favorites of Lewis’ fiction. Although fictional, there is a great deal of truth about the struggles and potential downfalls of the believer in Christ to be found in this short collection of letters between Screwtape, a high-level demon, and Wormwood, his nephew who is a low-level tempter in the minions of Satan. The quote at hand is:

“It is during such trough periods, much more than during peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.” Screwtape, chap. 8, p. 40.

The trough periods Screwtape refers to are the low times in life that for some are manifested as periods of deep depression. Many a strong Christian has experienced such troughs over and over throughout their lives. I have experienced them to differing degrees myself, and our dear Bryan is experiencing just such a trough now. They are certainly no fun, and we often wish we could avoid them altogether, but experience tells us that is not possible. Perhaps it is not even truly preferable in the grand scheme of things as God sees it.

In the essay based on this quote, the author writes:

“Although the emotional peaks are bright and lovely and certainly more enjoyable, that doesn’t mean that the trough is the wrong place for us. The truth is that God is often most at work in the troughs—the hard places where we feel most desolate and alone. Sometimes when we’re trying to clamber back up to the peak, God may be calling us to stay awhile in the trough.”

“At these times we often feel full of confusion, fear, and sadness because we cannot see God’s hand at work, molding us by the very things we wish to escape. It is often only afterward, when he has moved us to a different place, that we can look back and see how he was working in the midst of the difficult spots.” The Soul of C.S. Lewis, pg. 115.

As I read this essay, I was reminded of Psalm 23. This well-known and beloved Psalm begins and ends in the peaks – “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want” and “I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” But in the middle is a definite trough – “the valley of the shadow of death.” I’m pretty sure there is no trough deeper or darker than this valley. But – and this is the important part – we don’t travel that valley alone. God is with us in the valley of the shadow of death, He is with us in the troughs of life.

The valleys of deep depression are not signs that we have been forsaken by God or that God has given up on us. He is walking with us through that valley, using every step of the way to help us grow in faith and grace, so that we will be able to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. So let us not try to clamber out of the troughs we encounter ahead of God and by our own power, but let us instead walk close by our Lord, following in His footsteps to see where He will lead. He is our Light in the darkness of the deep valley. May we stop to see all that He is illuminating there.

Jesus said, “I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” John 12:46 (NIV).

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Honesty

I am in the midst of a fierce struggle. I can’t seem to put anything together right now. I’m very eager for your prayers at this point.

Perhaps I’ll be back on line in a few days. There are almost 1000 posts on this site, and I encourage you to delve into them. I feel good about everyone, and I’m certain you will discover true blessings.

I am very tired, and yet have an inordinate desire to keep up a facade. But I can’t do this. If I can’t be honest with you, and myself then I’m in a bad place indeed.

I hope to be back in a couple of days. At least that is my “track record.” Psych issues are notoriously unpredictable.

“God began doing a good work in you, and I am sure he will continue it until it is finished when Jesus Christ comes again.” Philippians 1:6, NCV

Broken Prayers From the Edge

I lock the doors.  Close the curtains.  And let God have it.

I clinch my fists in a maddening rage as my hands tremble violently.  Within moments, my fingers ache from the intense, white-knuckle tightness.  And my forearms cramp up.  The blood rushes to my head.  And my eyes burn and burn and burn from the tears.

I speak, then shout — and scream.

My voice becomes raspy as I rant.  And soon, my throat burns.  My heart is aflame with grief and rage, so much so that my ears can no longer understand the words coming out of my mouth.  Before it’s over, I will blow my nose several times and wipe my eyes often and much.

I am broken — and I am praying.

I start with the loss of my friend, JD, a man taken far, far too soon.  A man who left behind a wife and two children.  I tell God that I do not think it is fair for his children to grow up without a father.  And then, I ask God why He didn’t take me instead, that I want to be with my children, that I don’t have any here for me.

“All I do is suffer and I am sick to death of it!!!”

And then, I rant about all the believers — never the broken — who paint a picture of life with Christ as a portrait of perfection.  Their grandiose testimonies have made me feel like God has something against me, like grace is a joke for people like me because my life has been so hard.  My brokenness is not the result of one trial, nor one tragedy — but a lifetime of unbearable loss.

“And it just keeps happening!!!”

I rattle off the names of those I’ve lost in just the past five years:  Jerry, Britany, Virginia, Rob, Terry, Nancy, Leroy, Art, Kim, Greg, Melody — and now JD.  I tell God that I am the anti-Midas.  Everything King Midas touched turned to gold, but I feel like everything I touch turns to dirt.  I am cursed.  “God has raised His fist against me.”

“How am I supposed to go on?  How?”

And then, in that moment, all of my rage and all of my grief and all that I am burns and burns and burns for The Almighty.  I am a man of faith — and, even in the midst of this monstrous mess my life has become, I know that He could end every ounce of this despair with a simple whisper.  A sign.  A something.  Anything.

“If You would just speak, this madness would end!”

With the last tissue, I tell God that I am convinced He wants me to suffer — alone, in this maddening agony.  I tell Him that I have given up on Him, that I cannot take any of this any more.  That I am broken.  And my heart is dead.  My pain is too great, my anguish too deep.  And that I will never serve God again for as long as I live.

“I can’t do it!  I can’t do it!  I just can’t do it!”

Three days later, God spoke to me through a dream.

“In my dream, I had a vision…”

To learn more, read “Safe in the Mouth of Danger.”

 

Love,

The NorEaster

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In Pursuit of Happyness

By CARONAE HOWELL, From the New York Times, dated July 20, 2009

flight1
To fly away

I’m the kind of woman who spends entire days thinking of nothing but birds: woodcocks, goldfinches, kingfishers. I look for loons everywhere I go. Sometimes I find herons in Central Park and they are mysteries. There is one thing in this world that I envy: the hollowness of bird bones. In the three milliseconds of liftoff, a bird separates itself from its problems. The sky is the freest part of the world.

I have always been depressed, and I have always wanted to fly — not to emulate Superman or to travel faster. I want to fly because of the elation. In my dreams I am a butterfly or a fairy or a honeybee. Depression, for me, is when you want to be a bird, but can’t.

There is a specific moment in which I became a woman. It was February — always the worst month with its aching light and its slip-induced bruises. I had been trying to fall asleep for at least four hours. At 3 a.m., I found myself sobbing and shaking and confused, sitting on my metal dorm bed in the bird-with-a-­broken-wing position. I dug my fingernails into my forearms, leaving shell-shaped trenches behind. I have the kind of skin that refuses to heal, just stays eternally raw and mottled. It was five weeks into my fourth semester.

In late January, a freshman hanged himself in my old dorm. I found myself asking, really, how hard is it to suddenly find yourself perched on a sink, rope around your beautiful neck, ready to fly? How hard? My dad drove through four states to pick me up the next week. On the way home I had tea and ice cream. He asked me if I remembered the time he took too many of his antidepressants. I did not. Nor did I remember my uncle’s suicide (gun to the cerebrum) or my sister’s delicately sliced arms and hips. These were things I had only been told. The space between my skull and my irises hurts sometimes — hurts like the shatter of a tiny bird that has fallen midflight.

And so it was that sour February night that I took the delicate step into the adult world: realizing that I was too depressed to stay at college was realizing I had not only lost my flock; I had fallen from the air entirely. Michigan has many birds. My favorite might be the wood duck, with its banded neck and flat little wings. When I watch birds take off, I hold my breath. They always make it to the sky.

Every Monday morning at 9 I see my therapist, mug of green tea and honey close at hand. I take new pills now. I have a routine: oatmeal in the morning, Wednesday nights with my father. I tell my therapist about Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Who isn’t searching for their people? I arrange my thoughts. (No, I have never been in love and I am, in fact, afraid of men; I panic in Times Square; I grow attached to almost everyone I meet.) I have feathers and questions.

I moved to New York City for college in 2007. School did not grow me into an adult, nor did voting for the first time or doing my own banking. These things were not confrontations. How did I arrive at the place where I could look at my disease and say, “Yes, you are here, but I will not let you take the joy out of looking for birds”? I like to think it was New York, or my newfound discipline, but it was a more internal revolution. I acknowledged my traumas: I was not crazy, just damaged. I was molting. Columbia gave me many new things: a copy of the “Iliad” with a note saying the first six books should be read before orientation, a job in the oral history office, a sense of time management.

But without my sanity — without joy — these things had little value. I knew nothing until I knew I was hardly living. Hobbes and Locke and all the philosophers in the world could not matter when each day was insurmountable and burning. In my year and a half at Columbia, I began to learn how to love myself. I tell my therapist about my earliest memories and the bizarre geography of my family. I’m anxious and I have no self-esteem. But I am mending. Fifteen lost credits is a small price to pay for happiness. Perhaps I am learning how to fly. My bones may not be hollow, and joy will never come easily, but the beauty is in the struggle. The birds are everywhere.

Caronae Howell, Columbia, class of 2011, history major