Eight Months Later, It Might Be Hope

Many years ago, before my husband and I were even married, we went to a concert of a musician who I had never seen perform before. Her name was Sara Groves, and the only two songs that I remember from that night are one she wrote for her sons that I sang to my own boys in tears once I understood what the words to her song actually meant, and another song she wrote for a friend who had been in a long season of depression. At the time I don't know that I would have said I had ever been depressed, although looking back now, I can pinpoint specific periods of time when I was most definitely struggling with depression, but I didn't know what to call it. And yet the words to this song spoke to me.

As I tried to put into words what I was feeling yesterday, this song came to mind, and as I refreshed my memory as to the words of the song, it felt like the most perfect way to explain.

You do your work the best that you can;
You put one foot in front of the other.
Life comes in waves and makes its demands;
You hold on as well as you're able.

You've been here for a long, long time...

Hope has a way of turning its face to you
Just when you least expect it:
You walk in a room; you look out a window,
And something there leaves you breathless.
You say to yourself,
"It's been a while since I felt this,
But it feels like it might be hope."

It's hard to recall what blew out the flame;
It's been dark since you can remember.
You talk it all through to find it a name
As days go on by without number.

You've been here for a long, long time...

Hope has a way of turning its face to you
Just when you least expect it:
You walk in a room; you look out a window,
And something there leaves you breathless.
You say to yourself,
"It's been a while since I felt this,
But it feels like it might be hope."

Suddenly the thought of weaning off the anti-depressant I've been taking for 7 months didn't feel overwhelming or terrifying. Suddenly I felt like I was willing to try not taking the medication I've been using to help me sleep. Suddenly the conversation about having more children, which up until this point had felt absolutely beyond what I could even comprehend, was a conversation I wanted to have.

Nothing big changed between Monday and Tuesday. I have been doing what I have been trying to do for the last eight months: Just keep swimming. My husband is still looking for a full-time job at a church. We are still living off his severance package from our old church. Our future still looks very fuzzy from our perspective. And yet, overnight, everything got brighter and I felt like a veil had been removed from my eyes. 

I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the staff at the boys' school who so graciously encouraged Stephen when he got knocked out of the spelling bee. I was thankful for my mom, who is always there to talk to me on the phone. I praised the Lord for our new church home, where we are being discipled and loved and cared for. I thanked Jesus for mental clarity, for the ability to resist the temptation to be overtaken by anxiety. It has not been too long for me to remember drowning in anxiety, and feeling the onset of it and then being able to fight it by God's grace is not something I am taking for granted. I texted a friend to thank her for pushing me to go back to a Bible study I have been gone from for over a year, to thank her for not letting me isolate myself.

These things were true before yesterday, but I just couldn't see how beautiful they are. I could objectively see them as blessings, but they didn't feel in my heart like blessings. I know that the Christian life is not based on our feelings, and for that I am ultimately thankful, but God created us as emotional beings, and so we can't completely divide our faith from our feelings. We must always respond in obedient faith to our feelings, even when our feelings seem more real than Jesus. But every once in a while, like on this particular Tuesday, God graces us with the beauty that is the unification of our faith and our feelings. We believe, and we feel, and both of them are appropriate.

It's been a while since I felt this, but it feels like it might be hope.