Several friends and friends of friends are in the thick of it right now. Swallowed up by depression, anxiety or both. Tis the season.
So I’m reposting a series of essays I wrote in August of 2009 about my own struggle with depression and how God and the people who love me best brought me through it. After the last essay from 2009 is reposted here I’ll write one new one about what I’ve learned in the last three years about depression and keeping it at bay.
I hope something in all these words helps you and yours – gives you hope, a prescription for healing or just the comfort of knowing you’re not the only one.
Here’s the first essay…
Six feet long. Four feet wide. Maybe five feet tall. A blue concrete box with one barred window. Roof made of plastic sheets held in place by heavy sticks, rocks and unidentifiable pieces of junk.
We sat on the floor of Kiran’s house and asked her questions. Then the eleven year-old girl asked us one.
She stood up straight and through a proud smile she asked, “How do you like my home?”
I held back tears. So did the others. “It’s beautiful,” we said.
She went with us for a walk through her neighborhood – past open sewers, across the bridge that spanned polluted waters, past the sex slaves and their Johns and their stares.
Somewhere along the way Kiran began to cry. She cried, she said, because she was very happy.
Why?
What could possibly move a girl living in twenty-four square feet to tears of joy? What could bring a smile in such a wretched place?
Why?
“I have God,” she said. And then she sang. She held hands and sang and practically floated like a firefly through the darkness. “Lord I lift your name on high…Lord I love to sing your praises…”
I sat on the floor of the shower wailing one morning last week. Maybe it was Tuesday. The last few weeks all run together now.
Hopelessness. Despair. Insignificance. Deep inexplicable sadness. It filled me up until it groaned out of me uncontrollably. “Where are you God?” I shouted at the floor. “Where did you go? Why are you leaving me here? Why? Save me!”
The darkness didn’t lift but it thinned, quieted for a moment, and for the first time in days I had a thought that didn’t sound like my own. It wasn’t doubt, fatigue, hopelessness, or fear. “Now it’s just you and me.”
I think it was God.
I thought about Kiran and about all the people of the third world I’ve met over the last several years. The little girl in Ethiopia who gave me flowers. The grandmother in El Salvador who offered to kill her only chicken to feed me. I thought about the things I’ve prayed for when I’ve left them. I’ve envied their joy and begged God for it. I’ve coveted their dependence on him and wished I could have it. I never imagined the cost or cause of their contentment and communion with God.
“Now it’s just you and me,” God thought inside me.
“So this is what it’s like,” I thought back. And then the darkness covered me up again and I sobbed until my muscles hurt from it and the water ran cold.
Alia Joy says:
Thank you for your brutal honesty in this post. I struggle with depression too and have been in the thick of it the past couple months. It has helped tremendously to write about it and know I am not alone in it. Thank you for sharing your struggles. Even though it is a terrible thing to suffer, it blesses me.
grace at {gabbing with grace} says:
Thanks for sharing this. I too, have wrestled long and hard with depression many’o’nights….it’s a beast. It’s always helpful to know we are not alone. There were ways the Christmas season is harder on me as well…not sure why, but it catches me off guard, each year with so much heaviness when I’m “supposed to” be spreading holiday cheer. Anyway, beautiful post.
Deborah says:
thank you kindly for allowing us to be refined thru your pain, too, like Jesus ~ Blessings
Lisa says:
Thank you for reposting this, Shaun. I, too, am the thick-of-it….. it’s shocking how many are. I am so appreciative to know I will be reading this series again in the next few days. I loved it the first time; it ministered to me greatly. God bless you and your loved ones in need.
Heather says:
Having just gone through a season of “not quite feeling like myself” and a few sessions of therapy…i arrived quite at the same place. “Now just me & God”…all else cleared away: my desire for others’ approval, my need for perfect, my white-knuckled grip of control. Like Brother Lawrence often spoke, “I began to live as if there were no one in the world but Him & me…but a single-minded concern for God does not lead us away from people, but, to the contrary closer to them.”
(pst…thank you again for posting the pic of the Tozer book u are reading…sent me on a rabbit trail to lead me to the exact answer of a question that had been stirring in my mind).
Terri says:
Hi, I’m reading your site as part of the weblinks to my M.S. Counseling Psychology course in Psychopathology. I also have clinical depression, diagnosed as an adult, but most likely have had it since childhood. A book I started reading after meeting the authors is Conquering Depression, a 30-day plan to finding happiness, by Mark Sutton and Bruce Hennigan, M.D. who both struggle with depression. Short, practical, devotional-like readings combining medical knowledge and Christian counseling with tear-out cards to hang onto or post up throughout the day.
Annette says:
All I can say is wow. When you think that you are losing your mind and you see others struggling with the same thing it give me comfort. My depression has been covered up for many years with control and recently I have discovered that this is a generational curse in my family all the way back to my great grandmother. My mother just revealed to me that she still struggles with it. I do so want to be free from it and I am actually a counselor and really feel that understanding this can help me help others to cope. God is the only hope, perscriptions and coping mechanisms are good but only short lived. Thank you for your honesty and I will be continuing to read!