Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness (25 page)

Although these perspectives sound extreme, you find similar testimonies in every church. The benefits of hardship are well known. One of the arguments that counselors make against drug abuse is
that it medicates away suffering so addicts avoid it rather than face it, walk through it, and learn from it. As a result, they can seem immature and short on character.

After Jesus, however, perspectives on suffering become even more radical. Now, suffering is viewed as the pains of childbirth rather than a purposeless, random, meaningless event. Since Jesus came, suffering is redemptive. It is part of the pilgrim’s path, and it is a good one.

We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Rom. 5:3–4)

Suffering is a teacher. It taught Jesus (Heb. 5:8), and it can teach us. But it only truly teaches us as we fix our eyes on Jesus. If you avoid him in the midst of pain, expect to be embittered by it. But if you look to Jesus, you will no longer be alone. You will be strengthened, and you will be changed. Expect to say, “This is exactly what I needed. Through depression I have learned things about God and myself. It would have been nothing short of a tragedy not to have learned them.”

One of the lessons God gives is about love. “And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us” (1 John 3:23). Love God and love others—that is a summary of your purpose. If you are willing, expect to grow in loving others.

When we set out to love others even during our own suffering, the glory of Christ is unmistakable. It is just too unnatural to escape notice. When we are in pain, we usually aren’t thinking about other people. We are only thinking about where to find relief. Yet the Spirit makes us look more like Jesus, and Jesus certainly loved others deeply even during intense pain and rejection.

But expect hindrances. On this side of heaven, love will not grow without a fight. Any time the glory of Christ is in reach, you will find a resistance in your own heart that is abetted by dark powers. Such warfare is found in a number of common responses.

“I tried that and it doesn’t work.”

“What’s the point?”

“Jesus can do that, but I am not Jesus.”

Or people just ignore it. The call to love doesn’t even merit a response.

You, too, have excuses. When you embark on a plan to imitate the sacrificial love of Jesus, expect your heart’s resistance. It reminds you once again that to follow Christ means that you need the Spirit of Christ. Love for others comes from saying, “Jesus, I need you.” It comes out of faith and trust.

When you accept the challenge of loving others, expect more of your heart to be revealed because you are likely to love with strings attached. For example, you will love others
if
that will relieve your depression. “OK, God, I did my part. Now you do yours.” Or you will love others
so
you can be loved by others. If love proceeds from anything other than “we love because he first loved us,” expect to be disappointed.

If you are going to find joy in loving others, it will come from seeing that you have done something more important than relieving your depression. You have just seen the Spirit of God at work in your life. You have just seen evidence that you belong to Christ, and he is using you to accomplish his purposes.

Although the command to love others is simple, it is very unnatural to love, especially when we feel so empty. Expect the unnatural
in your life. Expect that you are going to be an ambassador for the King of love.

The apostle Paul’s most personal letter was his second letter to the Corinthians. Most of Paul’s letters addressed the nature of the gospel. They were not highly autobiographical. But in Corinth, he was under attack. False teachers were suggesting that Paul was not qualified to speak with authority. In this context, he spoke very personally.

What he highlights in particular, as a way to establish his apostolic credentials, is that he has suffered great pain and hardship because of the gospel of Christ.

• His hardships were so severe that he assumed he was going to die (1:8), again and again (11:23).
  
• He was “hard pressed on every side,” “perplexed,” “persecuted,” and “struck down” (4:8–9).
  
• He was beaten with rods threes times, flogged with forty lashes five times (11:24–25), imprisoned, and the focal point of a riot (6:5).
  
• He was stoned and left for dead (11:25).
  
• He often went without food and sleep (6:5).
  
• He was shipwrecked three times and once spent the night on the open sea (11:25).
  
• He lived with a disabling malady (12:7).
  

The point is this: when Paul speaks about suffering, he has credibility. Some people say that, yes, Jesus suffered, but he was God, so he could handle it. This, of course, is a purposeful maneuver to keep Jesus at a distance and justify self-pity. But it is impossible to try this excuse with Paul. Paul was a person like us, and his sufferings were more intense than our own.

With this in mind, consider his assessment of his life.

We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16–18)

He pronounces his suffering “light and momentary,” and he is still suffering!

Envision a scale—an old-fashioned scale where a known weight was put on one side and the items to be weighed were placed on the other. If the original weights were honest, you knew how much your items weighed when the scale balanced.

Paul is saying that, indeed, suffering is very weighty and oppressive. But what he has received in Jesus Christ is even weightier. It more than counterbalances the scales of suffering, making it seem light and ephemeral in comparison.

It sounds impossible, or at least exaggerated, but we all have experienced something similar. A child falls and scrapes her knees, but her cries stop as soon as she is given a lollipop. The pain has not disappeared, but the joy of a lollipop outweighs it. Even better, a child scrapes her knees, but her cries stop as soon as she is embraced by her mother. The pain has not disappeared, but the child has something even better.

A woman loses her job due to downsizing, only to be hired five minutes later by the firm in the next office—at a higher rate of pay. We are all familiar with bad things that are outweighed by something much better.

For Paul to counterbalance the weight of his sufferings, he needed something extraordinary, and he found that in Jesus. This
alone should be hopeful to you. It is like meeting a person who has gone through severe depression and says, “I made it. I am much better. You can be too.” Even without knowing how this person made it, you are encouraged that it is possible.

Paul is happy to share his remedy with you, and he makes it clear that it is available to anyone who wants it, no matter who you are—however old, sick, or hurt.

Do you think God is stingy? Yes, you do. But Paul reminds you that he has made scads of promises and they are all “yes” (2 Cor. 1:20). Will he forgive? Yes. Will he never leave? Yes. Will he love with an everlasting love? Yes. Will he show unlimited patience? Yes. Will he make you his bride? Yes.

Do you know what you look like when you seek Jesus? Think of Moses when he came down from the mountain. He was a blaze of glory. His face shone with the reflected light of God in such a way that he had to wear a veil until the glory faded. Paul alluded to that story when he said that “we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with everincreasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). These are some of the reasons why Paul’s suffering seemed light and momentary. In light of what he had received, his pain was minimal in contrast.

But it wasn’t only what he had received. It was also what he was
going
to receive. Paul delighted in the present benefits of the cross, but he knew enough about misery and sin that his sights were always set in front of him. He was especially looking forward to the eternal glory—the glory that was to come. Somehow, that hope changed everything.

Depression gives you tunnel vision. Scripture gives you vistas that extend from the beginning of creation to eternity. If you aren’t dazzled by the expanse that Scripture lays in front of you, be persistent. As you keep looking, you will see more and more. One of your goals is to let the apostle Paul be your eyes until you can see more clearly.

Rod understood before I did.

“All this sounds nice, but what we are talking about is a big deal. This is about a complete overhaul of my life!”

He was right. Depression can accumulate lots of inaccurate interpretations about ourselves, other people, and God himself. Scripture comes and corrects those misinterpretations and false beliefs. But Rod was saying that we can’t just expect the old mental files to be removed and new ones inserted. No, these changes come only through a battle, and key to the battle is that we humble ourselves before the Lord and believe what he says.

In a story, the ending makes all the difference. A tragic story like Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
starts well, with people full of hope and love, but it ends badly. A comedy like
Much Ado About Nothing
opens with dark omens and scheming betrayers. The future looks very uncertain, but it turns out wonderfully. It is the ending rather than the humor that makes it a comedy.

You must decide whether you will live life as a tragedy or a comedy. The story that Jesus offers you is a comedy.

When you are watching a good comic movie for the first time, you are tense and on the edge of your seat because you don’t know where the story is going. You want the best for the main characters, but something always seems to interfere. When you finally reach the end, and the heroes live happily ever after while the villains get their due, you relax. Shakespeare was right—
All’s Well That Ends Well.

Now watch the play or movie a second time. This time you are familiar with the plot. The difficulties are still there, and it looks like everything is headed for ruin, but you are hopeful. You are alert to the signs that things will soon go well. There isn’t the fear or heaviness that accompanied the first viewing. You still go through a range of emotions. You cry and laugh at the same points. But you interpret the entire story by its climax. Like a reader who reads the last chapter first, you see the hardships in a very different light.

Scripture tells you the end, and, if you have put your faith in Jesus rather than in yourself, it is your end too. Jesus wins. His justice prevails. His love is seen for what it really is—boundless and irresistible. Our unity with him exceeds our imaginations. We will see that life was much more purposeful than we thought. Everything we ever did by faith—because of Jesus—stands firm and results in “praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Pet. 1:7). Knowing this, of course, does not blot out sorrow. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes in
Lament for a Son
, we are “aching visionaries.”
¹
But knowing the end reveals that sorrow and death don’t win. For those who know Christ, life and joy are the last word.

By now you understand that hope is a key issue in depression. The critical transition is from hopeless to hopeful. You also understand that God makes promises, and he is pleased when we anticipate their fulfillment. God prizes hope. It says to him that we will
not try to find our homes on earth, but we will look forward to the very best—to find our home in his presence.

One thing I ask of the L
ORD
, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the L
ORD
all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the L
ORD
and to seek him in his temple. (Ps. 27:4)

Hopelessness means that

• you are unwilling to wait
  
• you want something more than you want Jesus
  
• you don’t really know Jesus.
  

While our culture elevates riches and health, hope is one of the most coveted spiritual possessions. You get it by asking for it and by practicing it. You practice it by remembering and meditating on God’s story.

Without God’s story, everyone should be depressed, hopeless, and despairing because, with all the counterfeit stories, everything we deeply cherish comes to ruins in the end. There simply is no hope. “Why bother?” colors everything. Apart from the story of the cross and the resurrection, we are people who just sold our house to a developer. Settlement is tomorrow, and the plan is to raze the house and use the property as a parking lot. In such a case, you would
not
buy new carpets, prune the shrubs, or paint the eaves. The property will be destroyed anyway; why invest so much effort and money?

Even the story of science, with all its confidence that we can make things better, ultimately can’t give hope. A Nobel laureate might make impressive discoveries, but he knows that his work only scratches the surface, will be read by few, will be surpassed by others, and will do nothing to conquer death.