Becoming a Disciple-Making Church: A Proven Method for Growing Spiritually Mature Christians by Neil T. Anderson

Author:Neil T. Anderson [Anderson, Neil T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: REL108030, REL023000
ISBN: 9780764215360
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-26T08:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Overcoming Depression

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer.1

That was the suicide note that Virginia Woolf penned for her husband before she drowned herself in a river. It was also the opening scene in The Hours, a movie that intertwined three related stories of severely depressed people. The title is in reference to the hours and hours of never-ending agony that accompany depression. Her present circumstances were anything but negative, so why was she depressed? What are those “voices”?

Approximately eighteen million people in America (about 10 percent of all adults) will suffer from depression in any given year, according to the National Institutes of Health. Only a third of those people will seek treatment for their depression. David was said to have a whole heart for God, yet his numerous bouts of depression are recorded throughout the Psalms. Martin Luther battled depression most of his life. Abraham Lincoln said, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”2 Friends of Abraham Lincoln said of him, “He was a sad looking man; his melancholy dript from him as he walked,”3 and “He was so overcome with mental depression that he never dare[d] carry a knife in his pocket.”4 Sir Winston Churchill referred to his own recurrent depression as the Black Dog. A biographer notes, “He had an enemy worthy of the word [Black Dog], an unambiguous tyrant whose destruction occupied him fully and invigorated him totally year in and year out.”5

Let’s face it, living in this fallen world can be depressing. Depression is a natural consequence when we experience losses in our lives. It is critically important that we understand how to respond to such losses, since everything we now possess someday we shall lose. It is God’s intention that we grow through the trials of life and learn how to overcome feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. The richest treasures are often discovered in the deepest holes. What we need is the assurance that can only come from a God of all hope. Someone once said that we can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, and about eight minutes without air—but only one second without hope.

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