Shaun Groves
Another essay on depression written long ago.
So many patients (and their doctors) believe they will always be depressed – so they stop fighting. Depression is not a lifelong illness for everyone, or even most. So fight back.
Here’s part six…
How could I sing about a God I wasn’t consistently sure existed, a God I was angry at and felt abandoned by? How could I talk about the power of hope over poverty when I felt so hopeless and poor?
So I canceled my gigs at LifeFest and in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin and decided to stay off the road until what I believed lined up again with what I sing and say on stage. Everyone in my life believed it would someday. I didn’t know.
That weekend I went to church differently than I ever had before. For the first time in my life I walked in desperate.
Spiritually poor.
Unable to make ends meet.
And through trying.
I didn’t shake hands with people. I hugged them. People I didn’t even know.
I didn’t say “good” when people asked me how I was doing. “I’m not good at all,” I’d say. “Please pray for me.”
I didn’t notice the squirmy kids around me. I sat on the edge of my seat sifting every sentence for answers, hope, anything at all to bring me back to life.
I didn’t just sing along. I sang to God through tears, through anger and doubt, sometimes on my knees with my face pressed into the back of a metal folding chair. Sometimes words came out. Sometimes only groans.
Honestly, I’m a tiny bit embarrassed by it all now, but at the time I didn’t care what anybody thought. I wanted to be rescued, to see God, to be healed. Desperately.
And when it was all over the darkness was gone. To me, that was miraculous.
I was more than a week into the depression by this point and a pattern had clearly emerged: Every morning I woke up melancholy and descended into total despair over the next hour or so. I usually crumpled up somewhere and started crying sometime in the late afternoon when everything felt most hopeless. And just before bed I enjoyed about an hour, maybe two, of being almost normal again.
It was the same every day. But not that day.
Someone once told me that small things in the physical world can be great acts of violence in the spiritual world. Breathing. Singing. Praying. Hugging. They somehow push back the darkness, lay to waste the enemy like atom bombs lobbed from one dimension into the next.
All I know is that I walked away from church that morning certain I was loved by people and by God, that I was not crazy, that I was not a lost cause. Something pierced the darkness. When Penelope showed me what she colored in Sunday school I thought it was beautiful and I smiled. I smiled! When Becky held me I could feel it in my bones. And the burrito I had for lunch tasted good – so good.
Sure, late the next day the darkness came to cover me up again, but those few hours of light got me through the next week of anguish.
“Never doubt in the darkness what God has told you in the light,” my older wiser friend would soon write to me.
After he did, I just kept trying to remember Sunday.
And breathing. Singing. Praying. Hugging. Fighting back.
Kimmy says:
You’ll probably never read my post, but I will share you something personal that I need to say.
I needed your post. I lost my uncle unexpectedly and suddenly December 30, 2012. I was at church when I found out. I couldn’t cry because I didn’t want people to worry, but I didn’t know what to do. I felt like my world ended. We are slowly discovering why he died. But, it doesn’t change that he did. Being at places that he and I were at, and him not there, was something my mind couldn’t comprehend. I kept hoping that I would wake up and God would go “April Fools!” and he would be back. And going through New Years when its naturally a time of happiness and joy was a time of utter confusion. I wanted to be happy, but in a second, I wanted to kill myself. I read your post, and it brought me back. I hope you can help others like me. I have been to doctors who have labeled me as having “clinical major depressive disorder” I can say, I was depressed, but I don’t think I needed a label. I called my friends, and I just open up to them. And they tell me that its normal to be depressed. Its healthy. If I didn’t grieve, they would worry. Which isn’t want I wanted. I didn’t want to grieve, because it hurt too much. I saw my grandpa die from cancer in January 2012 and then my uncle 11 months later.
Thank you for your post. It helped.
~Kimmy
Shaun Groves says:
There’s a big difference between grief and depression. When someone we love dies healthy people grieve. So sorry to hear about your loss but thankful to be even a small part of the comfort God is giving you.
Kimmy says:
I am thankful for it as well. I know there is a difference. I am 21 now, but when i was 16, I started cutting. It took a (very brave) person to come into my life to tell me it was wrong. And i messed up allot. I just couldn’t get it. I loved cutting. As weird as it sounds, its true. I even bought a pocket knife and carried it with me whenever I felt depressed. And I knew where all the best places were to do it. I loved it because i found relief. Though temporary, i found it. It was my mom’s cancer that stopped me completely. Because I realized i needed to care about someone other than myself. While my life might stink right now, so many others have it worse. I have been institutionalized twice for attempted suicide. The last one was in 2009. I just couldn’t find that thing that made me happy. Everything I found was a crutch, and even worse, temporary. And I was saved when I was 16, but clearly, I walked away. And i didn’t think God would forgive me EVER, so i decided that I wouldn’t want rejection anymore, so I never went back. It took a crazy radio DJ (we have been friends for almost 5 years now) on a christian radio station to say to me that 1. God won’t leave me. 2. No matter how many times I messed up (and trust me, its allot!) he wouldn’t walk away from me like everyone else did. 3. He also showed me that there are people way worse than me, and THAT sturred not only a change in me in regards to my addiction (cutting is an addiction… didn’t know that) but one that went to me now sponsoring a Compassion child, and corresponding with 11 others. And I know I hated the label because when i was 16 all i thought was “great. Now I have a label. And now I will have depression forever” I have seen people depressed nowadays, and it hurts me because i have been there, and for the past few weeks, I have been there. But, I have one thing that the world is missing. Its God. My friend said something to me a few years ago that I still remember he said “You shouldn’t be cutting. The kids you sponsor who go to bed constantly wondering about food, clothing, water, safety, the future, etc. THEY have a reason to want to cut, because they really do have nothing. But, you don’t. You have everything. Yea you might not have that NEW thing, but you have 100x more than your sponsored kids will ever have.”
Something that puts my life in perspective everyday.
But, thank you. Sorry, for the essay, but you really did help me. 🙂
~Kimmy
Katie Axelson says:
Though I’m sure I was disappointed to hear you wouldn’t be appearing at Lifest, thank you for not putting up a show and proclaiming something you didn’t believe. That takes guts. I’ve been there–not always making the right choice.
Ellen Read says:
‘small things in the physical world can be great acts of violence in the spiritual world’—-I believe this. I need to act on it fully! Thanks for this great series!