One of the real gifts of a Christian life is having traversed depression, where the experience of a joyless season teaches you something very important. Indeed, I believe it’s God that allows these experiences such that we would know the full-blown depression is a confounding circumstance that takes us all the way to empathy. And the true end point, I’m sure God has in mind is that we would come to the end of ourselves, acknowledging that we couldn’t overcome it in our own strength, to derive compassion that can only come from the heartland of the Lord.
Of course, in the circumstances we learn that God’s strength is in our weakness; that as we bear the suffering patiently, with faith that this too shall pass, we are granted strength enough to endure, and as Oswald Chambers would say, “strength for the minute.”
But I know this much for sure. When we are in that place where all joy has been sucked out of us, where we are a mess of tears, or where we are betwixt and between, where everything is awry — when we’re at our lowest ebb, to the point where disbelief at how bad things are takes over — we give into the temptation to feel guilty, and hence we are silent, from where we receive no support.
Spiritual abuse tends to take place when people make us feel guilty for being depressed, and therefore they hush us into silence, where we may genuinely feel we are in the wrong; and worst of all to believe the lie that sin has caused our depression. But that’s not the only issue that we are confronted with. In subscribing to really faulty doctrine, we can begin to believe the same lies, that we aren’t good enough for God, that our faith is too weak and that we’ll never get there, that we are constantly letting God down, and of course we fall into silence through the guilt we have ourselves put on.
In these places, quite simply, you are not letting God down, you are not a bad example for Christ; more it is to the contrary, God’s compassion can begin to shine through you in your weakness. It takes quite a courageous faith to accept this.
Whenever we are silent in our suffering, we are well advised to ask why. Has someone else inflicted the guilt on you, or are you feeling guilty yourself for not measuring up to God? Whether you feel it or not, God is close to the broken-hearted. And remember, depression is not about measuring up or not.
In our depression, we do not lack faith, because our faith is being fortified in the depression. Instead of suffering in silence because we feel guilty, we ought to throw off the shackles of shame as much as we have energy to do that and trust the trustworthy who are there for us at such a time is this. I know in depression we can feel as though we don’t have the energy for the interaction, and that is fine, but when we would sincerely crave connection and support, we ought not to feel we can’t reach out.
Many times in simply reaching out, we are given strength for the minute that God can and does give.
Photo by Timothée Duran on Unsplash
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