If They Can, Why Can't We?

Depression. Counseling. Anxiety. Therapy. Mental Health.

I think the attitude toward these words, toward these things, is changing, but even now, there is so much stigma attached to them. My impressions of these words for the first two-thirds of my life was that they were way "out there," that sure, some people had to deal with those things, but only in very serious situations.

I have been encouraged to see Christians begin to talk about these things out in the open. But what is even more interesting to me is to see non-Christians talk about them. Bunmi Laditan, the genius behind the Honest Toddler, writes openly and poignantly on her Facebook page about her battles with anxiety. From what she writes, it seems like she has made peace with her anxiety, at least to the extent that she can.

Even more recently, Kristen Bell, star of Frozen and my personal favorite, Veronica Mars, shared in a recent interview that she has struggled with anxiety and depression since her late teens. With the encouragement of her mother, who explained that mental health issues run strongly on the female side of her family, she began taking medication, which she says has helped tremendously.

I love how Bell compares her mental health issues to diabetes. Part of my own story is that taking medication truly changed my life. The fact that things changed so drastically once I had consistent amounts of an anti-depressant in my system proved to me that at least one component of my struggles was purely biological. It was not something I could choose to stop experiencing. More prayer, more Bible reading, more counseling was not going to fix it.

As I've watched this women talk openly in public spaces about these things, I've been encouraged to talk about it myself with other people. I'm not interested in trying to shock people with my transparency about my struggles. My goal instead is to say, "This has been very hard for me, but Jesus has carried me through and continues to carry me." Additionally, I want to be a safe place for other people to talk about what they're experiencing.

It's been amazing to me that sometimes, almost as soon as I utter the words "depression" or "anxiety," the person with whom I'm speaking blurts out, "I've struggled with that as well!" Instantly, a deep bond is formed between us, and it is no longer something to be ashamed of, but rather, something to talk about honestly.

I find it ironic that those who do not claim to believe the gospel are brave enough to share their struggles. They are not afraid to own their weakness.

So why are we? Why do we try to pretend like we have it all together? Even if you haven't ever been diagnosed with depression or anxiety, we are all guilty of building up a facade that looks good. We may even go so far as to use social media to reveal minor failings--I did just that on Sunday with a fail of a Mother's Day picture with my boys. But what if I were brave enough to admit that sometimes, when I'm with my boys and my anxiety is through the roof and they are continually talking so much so that my brain feels like it might explode, I will think about how all I want to do is run away from them and never see them again.

That is a momentary thought, and it passes, but I've had it more than once. And it's not the kind of thing you really want to post on Facebook or Instagram. It's ugly and dark.

But because of what Jesus has done, I can say it. I can say it to him, I can say it to Christian, and I can say it to trusted friends. Because that feeling is not the end of the story. Because of what Jesus has done, there is room to grow and grace to do it.

This morning we were in a rush to get out the door and both of the boys were talking at the same time. I felt my chest getting tight and just knew I was going to lose it at one or both of them. But almost as if someone else were controlling me, I put my hand on one of their shoulders and said quietly, "Hold on, sweetie, until your brother is finished talking."

Medication and counseling and pursuing spiritual disciplines have been vital to trudging out of the darkness I was in for many months. But Jesus can take me further than any of those things ever can. And because I know that he can and I know he will continue to do so, I will keep talking about those hard things. Truly, we're the only ones who should feel the most courage to do so.d

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.

Humility and Dependence

It was New Year's Eve 2014 and I sat on the steps going out to the parking lot from our apartment building. I had just finished telling my mom about the current trial we were facing at church, and when we finally ended the call, I released it all in tears instead of words. I was angry at people for not doing what I thought they should do. I was angry at the Lord for the way he had ordained things to happen. I was discontent with where our family was living. And as the hours in that day ticked away into a new year, I felt a gentle trail of thought weave through my mind: Lord, humble me. I knew that the answer to all of that anger and discontentment was humility. And so I prayed that 2015 would be a year in which the Lord taught me what it looked like to be humble.

As the months wore on I began to grow somewhat uncomfortable with what I felt the Lord was doing. For some reason I thought if I were truly humble maybe life wouldn't bother me so much. I would be content no matter what. The opposite was happening. Everything was hard. People disappointed me. I didn't feel like I was succeeding at all at being the kind of mom I wanted to be. And every once in a while I would think, "Am I being humble?" and I never really knew if I was or not.

Things happened, then more things happened. Then one night I was laying on a hospital bed in a sparse room with background sounds of mentally disabled men yelling at the staff in the nurses' station and for the first time in my life I felt that I was completely powerless to do anything. I couldn't leave the hospital by myself because my mom had driven me there and then they had sent her home until the morning. I couldn't even leave the room without permission. I couldn't call anyone because they had taken my purse. I was completely alone, and I couldn't do anything to fix it.

I had ended up there after three weeks of barely sleeping, which had exacerbated the growing anxiety produced by stressful events earlier in the summer. In an attempt to survive the weekend until I could go see my family doctor, I went to urgent care and asked them for something to help me sleep. I can't remember now what they gave me, but it sent me into an hours-long panic attack during which I truly thought I was going to die. It was the middle of the night and my mom came and took me to the hospital while Christian stayed with the boys.

In that room, by myself, I stared at the ceiling and tried to feel that Jesus was near me. I talked to him because there was nothing else to do. And I didn't hear him talking back to me (which would have been interesting, by the way, because the nurses who kept coming to check on me frequently asked me if I had heard voices) and I didn't feel any sort of spiritual emotions within me. But I knew I wasn't alone. I couldn't have lived, I don't think, if I had thought I was alone, because it had come to the point where I didn't think anyone could understand what it was like to want desperately to sleep but not be able to, to feel myself having a nervous breakdown and not be able to stop it, to not even feel able to be with my children for any length of time. But somehow, even though everything else in my mind was warring against me with lies and untruths, I knew that the one thing I could be sure about was that Jesus understood.

I wasn't thinking about whether or not I was humble that night. All I was thinking was, "JESUS, HELP ME!" I felt the full depth of my need for him, and I knew there was nothing I could do to help myself.

By God's grace, that night was an anomaly. Through counseling, medication, prayer, and faithful friends and family, I am in a much better place than I was back then. As this year drew to a close, though, I thought back on my goal of seeking humility last year. And it was then that I realized that I don't think God answers prayers for humility by making us more aware of whether or not we are being humble. Maybe for those who only have a moderate struggle with pride and self-reliance, he does work that way. But for me, it took knocking my feet out from under me until I could see my heart for what it is and feel how completely helpless I am without Jesus. That wasn't what I thought I was praying for on the last day of 2014. But that was how he answered it.

As 2016 starts, I have felt the word dependence ringing in my ears, and I am hesitantly praying that the Lord would change my heart to truly depend on him for everything I need. At first I was afraid to even think about this, because so far the way the Lord has answered my prayers for sanctification has been incredibly painful. But as we entered this year without a church and without a steady source of income, I realized that the Lord is already answering that prayer. We literally started 2016 in a position of forced dependence on the Lord. If anything changes, it will only be because of him.

I cannot pretend to understand the ways of the Lord, and I have stopped trying. The position he desires for us to take in relation to him is not one of equals, two partners discussing the right and wrong way to do things. He is the Father, and I am the child, and just as a child does not always like what his father chooses, the child of a truly loving father does not despair in his lack of understanding. He trusts not in the actions of the father but in the heart that he knows the father has toward him.

Here is my prayer for 2016: Lord, make me humbly dependent on you. I am afraid of what might happen when I pray this, because I feel numb and vulnerable and empty. But if you are the God you say you are, you know what I need before I need it. Give me the grace to trust you even when I don't understand.