What having depression says about a Christian’s faith

I’ve always found it interesting how Christians relate on the subject of mental illness.

I don’t think there are many these days who think Christians are beyond it, but there are still schools within the faith that believe Christians should be.  It seems these believe that the power and blood of Jesus cleanses us from more than just sin, and that we are just a little bit of prayer ministry away from being relieved completely of our maladies.

What is thin about this theology is its compression of the spiritual warfare that the New Testament heralds as a conquest against us.  It underestimates the dimensions of interpersonal conflict which the Bible devotes much thought and the key commandments to.  And it treats our own propensity to doubt, fear, guilt, shame, etc., as folly, when God’s Word grants that these are human realities of challenge in all people’s lives, including believers’.

What does the Bible say about depression?

Depending on who you talk to there are between 42 and 65 lament psalms.  That’s a large chunk of the biblical Hebrew poetry.  The whole of Lamentations, barring a few verses in the middle, is lament.  Every part of Job, barring the last chapter features chords of lament and complaint and the incomprehensibility of God.  To round out the biblical wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes doesn’t disappoint either.

How many historical stories in the Bible are not sad through and through?  How many feature characters that suffer a great deal?  Not many of the prophets are happy clappy people.  Are there any?

When we swing into the New Testament, we find that even though the apostles counted it joy to suffer for the name of Christ, they also suffered bitterly from time to time, especially when they were assailed by their enemies.  Even Jesus was overcome by grief occasionally.

We are in fantastic biblical company when we are oppressed from every side. And we can also count it as God’s purpose when depression overcomes us through burnout or loss and even through unexplained departures into spiritual crisis.

God is often getting our attention through the depressions we face.  Indeed, as we fall to our knees, coming to the end of ourselves, finding we have no more strength to contend with, we capitulate in our weakness and God’s strength becomes never more relevant.

We will all have our depressed days, and it’s a folly to think we can wave a ‘magic book’ at the inscrutability of the human experience and achieve a perfect one-for-one record.  Perhaps some would say that within this statement lies an abject lack of faith.  Victory at all times is just not the reality that many Christians experience.  And I’d be the last one to say that the Bible can’t impact our depression, because I know in personal experience it very well does; it’s just not a panacea in all situations at all times.

Whenever we face longer seasons of spiritual demise into depressions that resemble the dark night of the soul, we arrive in the land of the mystics, and there were no more deeper people spiritually than those.

Some of the mightiest men and women of God have been plagued by mental and emotional illness that rose up into spiritual crises that catapulted their faith into the realms of legend.  Heroes for their own glory?  No way!

Our Christian faith actually says a lot about the realities of challenge related to our mental, emotional, and spiritual health and ill-health.  We only have to think of the purpose that God has in allowing us our spiritual reticence.

Do we go there by choice?  No, of course we don’t.  Can God show us anything on the way there and at our arrival and through the passage of slow recovery?  Of course, it’s a yes!

A Christian with depression is high on the wave of faith.  They learn more about their faith in stepping forth into their fear than they would if they weren’t required to be so courageous.

A Christian who is depressed is living the truth that life in the world is full of troubles.  Thankfully we can all rest on the truth that Jesus has overcome the world.  But that doesn’t mean as Christians we won’t suffer depression.  Many of us inevitably will.

Photo by Tyssul Patel on Unsplash