Beauty in the Browns by Paul Asay

Author:Paul Asay [Asay, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Living / Inspirational, RELIGION / Christian Living / Personal Growth
Publisher: Focus on the Family
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

“Even those people whose faith promises them that this will all be different in the next world cannot help experiencing anguish in this one,” wrote Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon. And that is all too true. “Christ himself was the man of sorrows.”[12]

As I was writing this very chapter, the senior pastor for my church began a series on the prophet Elijah—suggesting that even this mighty man of God suffered from depression.

He had lots of reasons to be depressed, of course. I’ve never had the queen of Israel plot to kill me.

Still, it’s striking when you read 1 Kings 19:4.

But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.”

(It’s also interesting that God walked Elijah through the same template that got me through my depressive episode when I was with the rodeo: time, love, and, frankly, a kick in the rear. God sent an angel to feed Elijah, sent him on a forty-day journey in the wilderness and—when Elijah still wasn’t going anywhere but to the back of the cave—said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He then pushed him out to take care of some important business, which Elijah did, because even prophets need to cowboy up every now and again.)

He’s not alone. Dealing with depression as I have, it’s curiously heartening to read about how many of God’s chosen have fought despair, hopelessness, and even thoughts of wanting to just be done with it all.

Jonah told God that it was “better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:3). Jeremiah is sometimes called the “weeping prophet” because of the misery he felt. Job, my favorite biblical depressive, “took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes” (Job 2:8). While lots of biblical commentators say all that scraping was meant to deal with the boils he was suffering with, the great nineteenth-century theologian Albert Barnes is one of several who suggest the scraping was meant also (in Barnes’s words) to “‘indicate’ the greatness of his calamity and sorrow.”[13] (When I read the passage, I can’t help but be reminded of cutting.)

David wrote many an anguished psalm. Other psalmists poured out their hurt and sorrow to God (and everyone else) in their songs. In Psalm 73, Asaph sounds deeply self-pitying for much of it, and then writes what might sound to some a poetic description of depression and what it can do to us:

Thus my heart was grieved,

And I was vexed in my mind.

I was so foolish and ignorant;

I was like a beast before You.

PSALM 73:21-22, NKJV

But then Asaph turns around and says what we depressed Christians should always ultimately say:

Nevertheless I am continually with You;

You hold me by my right hand.

You will guide me with Your counsel,

And afterward receive me to glory.

PSALM 73:23-24, NKJV

We can’t know for certain that these characters suffered from depression.

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