Christians and Depression

It has been a while since my last update. I have found that I have had little time to write recently and the time that I do have I seldom find the energy. Nevertheless, I do hope what I have to say here is beneficial to my readers even if I'm not always as consistent as I'd like to be.

As my wife and I have grappled with the trials of taking care of Karis and raising Kales, the temptation to despair has all too often confronted me. While I go through my personal struggles of introspection and melancholy, I have been reflecting on how the church's attitude towards Christians and depression. In fact, a book was recently released entitled Christians Get Depressed Too by David Murray (which I have not yet read) that addresses this very issue. In short, my perception is that the church's position is that Christians are always to be cheery, positive, and upbeat. The sad truth is that this expectation does not coincide with the reality that many Christians do in fact get depressed.

As a result of the church's position that Christians do not experience depression, there is a general ignorance among Christians about how to minister to believers who are going through it. Often, depression is mistaken for sadness (which has a singular definite cause or root) and so a person may be told to read the Bible or pray more. While the means of grace are certainly important, true depression is like a fog that looms over us in an elusive manner. Perhaps the worst part of not knowing depression's origin is not knowing its ending either. The fact that depression does not have an immediate cure means that sometimes our own misery is magnified by reflecting on our own despair. As C.S. Lewis said, "Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief."

In light of the reality of depression and its presence among believers, every Christian falls into one of two categories: sufferer or non-sufferer. If you are a non-sufferer and do not understand the nature of this malady, be sure to study up before counseling someone. It is better to be informed than to misspeak. To those who are sufferers, I would like to give you five brief aids (these are certainly not cures) to dealing with depression.

1. Find Friends.
Don't go it alone! One of the most vicious cycles of depression is that when you are depressed you want to isolate yourself and when you isolate yourself your depression worsens. Find friends who you can trust, who you can be honest and forthright with. Forget about the stigma. Seek community.
2. Fake it until you make it.
With depression, we lose interest in doing things, all things in some cases. As much as you can, take small steps towards taking action on things you are unmotivated to do. Read that chapter of Scripture you've been putting off. Clean the dishes. Deliver an errand.
3. Invest in a hobby.
This may seem trite but our Lord is the Lord of leisure as well. Sometimes a new interest (such as taking up basketball, puzzles, writing) may help provide the variety that disrupts the sameness of depression and draws you outside of yourself. God's world teems with various activities and adventures that await us.
4. Memorize simple promises of God's Word.
I emphasize "simple" here because when depressed it is often hard to concentrate. However, you can take one or two verses and say them over and over to yourself. Meditation is key. Quality over quantity.
5. Pray for deliverance.
This is not to be overlooked. The Lord's deliverance is key in the battle against this mental anguish. Cry out to him. Bring to him your despair and your heartache. He is near to those who are afflicted.

Fighting the Fear Freefall with Faith

Fear is a powerful emotion. Its potency lies not so much in the fact that it involves uncertainty about the future but that, if we are honest, it involves uncertainty about all of the future. It is the totality of fear that really drives us mad. Think about how much you could be fearing right now about your future. What if I lose my job? What if my spouse divorces me? What if my child dies? What if I get in a car accident? What if I lose my mind? This is what I call the fear freefall.

Logically, we know that everything that we fear cannot happen to us all at once. And that's at times precisely what scares us! Although we may do everything in our power and our control to keep our spouse happy or to keep an employer happy, perhaps our spouse dies in a tragedy or the business shuts down. As we all know, the most scary events in our lives are often ones that surprise us and what we least expected.

Fear has a funny way about getting us to live in a future, imaginary world. We lose sight of what is present before us in our Father's world because we are far-sighted. We keep looking for a danger down the road all while missing what God is calling us to in the present moment. Fear is also unreasonable. When we try to reason ourselves out of fear, it turns into obsessive compulsive behavior ("I might die in a car accident if I get on the highway"; compulsion: "I will avoid highways). When others try to reason us out of the fear, it often seems unsympathetic. When my wife touches me on the shoulder and says she hears someone outside the house at 2 am and she is scared and I grumble (through my sleep), "Don't be afraid", I am not really showing my concern for her fear. I am devaluing her fears because I haven't really expressed compassion and entered into her world. Perhaps I should wake up with her and reason and explain that we have never been burglarized before, that the area is a safe area, or that most criminals look for convenient crimes and don't want to break into homes that are securely locked, but all I have done is really tried to reason with her fear. And her fears cannot be reasoned with. Fear is sub-logical or, as Ed Welch says in his book Running Scared, it has its own logic to it. Fear says, "Well, I have never been burglarized or the victim of a violent crime before so it has to happen sooner or later, right?"

Additionally, while I protect my wife and children and like to think I can defend them adequately, ultimately it is the Lord who protects them. I cannot protect them from every robber, thief, or murderer. I cannot protect them from a car accident (no matter how careful I drive). I cannot protect them from an airplane crash. I cannot protect them from getting cancer. Jesus Christ does. Thus, here is the key to finding a landing spot in the freefall of fear: faith in a God who is both sovereign and caring. The great news of the gospel is that not only does God control everything that takes place in his universe but he also cares for all his children. While we may temporarily assuage our fears with rationalizations or other people, in the end we must go to the King of Kings who is powerful and loving to soothe our restless hearts.

The Cough

Underneath the "How I Saw Jesus" section of my journal this morning, I had written one cryptic word: "the cough." Every morning I make a list of the way Jesus reveals himself to me in the day and the things included range from the sacrifice a couple made in watching Kales, a conversation about Christ with a Muslim lady who brought coffee, and being distracted from an errand to help a fallen old lady to things like a sunset, laughter, and child. However, behind each of these items is a story that I could tell you about how I witnessed the person and presence of Christ in what would otherwise seem to be an ordinary, mundane daily event. Last evening, it was through a cough, specifically the cough of Karis, an action which for most of us is automatic and reflexive, that I saw Jesus.

It all began around 4:30 pm. Since Karis has been in the hospital for pneumonia, Katie has been taking the night shift and I have the day shift. Outside of the routine care that Karis requires and consultation with various medical staff, there is a lot of idle time of watching her rest. During these moments, I instinctively detatch myself from her to a certain degree because the weight of my own daughter suffering is overwhelming. Around 4:30 p.m. when Karis began to sound like she was drowning in her secretions, I re-entered reality. The full force of my daughter and her intense suffering overcame me and I wept for about two hours straight, alternating between tears and prayers for the Lord to grant her one simple thing: a cough. I won't provide a transcript of my prayers here but I will be transparent. They were filled with complaining and contending. They included expletives. I was hurting, grieving, frustrated and crying out.

I would like to share with you two of the prayers that I repeated before the Father in the name of the Son last night however. First, I continuously asked, "Why does she have to be broken Father? Why is my daughter disabled and suffering?" Almost immediately, in my dialogue before God, I had a response, "Karis is not the one who is broken. She is not the one who is disabled. You and Katie and are the ones who are broken and disabled. Karis is my Karis for you." I wept as I knew this to be true; Karis taught Katie and I more about God's grace than we ever could learn without her. Additionally, the notion of healing is included in the lexical range of Karis in the Greek. How does healing relate to grace? Healing is what grace does. In other words, healing is the activity of grace. God, through Karis' life, has brought healing to Katie and I by curing us of much of our sinful dispositions. As I wrote to Katie the other day, "God gave us Karis to make you sit and to make me serve. He gave us her to make you more of a Mary and me more of a Martha." God sovereignly brought Karis into the world so that he might display his transformative, healing grace to us by giving us a terminally ill child who is not under our control. In essence, both Katie and I are recovering control freaks. I control internally (as I posted about a few days ago through bailing from a situation through escapsim) and Katie externally (through busyness). God is answering the petition, "your kingdom come" by bringing the kingdom in the lives of Katie and I in molding us into restful servants.

Although the Lord's response of reminding me of my own brokenness and specifically my brokenness of withdrawing was penetrating, I continued to beg the Lord for him to make me the one in the hospital bed instead of Karis. I wanted to trade places with her so she could be completely healthy and I could die. Then, it was as if the Spirit was saying to me, "You can't trade places with her." My thoughts immediately went to Calvary and I saw Jesus on the cross taking my place as my substitute. In Karis' innocent suffering in that bed, I saw somewhat of a parallel. For clarification, Katie and I both recognize that Karis is guilty of original sin and counted as a sinner because Adam is her father. To our knowledge, however, she has never committed any actual sin (though we do not know her thoughts). Those theological caveats aside, even as a sinner, Karis is still innocent of this particular disease. There was no particular actual sin that she committed that brought this disease on her. Thus, in that way her suffering is innocent. And through the glimpse of my daughter's innocent suffering I caught a glimpse of the truly innocent suffering of the sinless Son of God who suffered in my place for my sin. I couldn't trade places with Karis because ultimately a greater healing than Karis' healing needs to take place in my heart and in Katie's and this healing can only come through the suffering of my daughter. Further, my next question of "Why my daughter" was halted by the Lord's immediate response of, "Why my Son?" I stood in awe.

At the end of this two hour vigil, Karis coughed. Twice. Two whooping coughs that she initiated all on her own. I wept tears of joy. I composed myself and called Katie to tell her the good news. She had just been praying on the phone with Anna Grantham for Karis to cough and as soon as I called Katie hung up with her friend and heard the news. She began to cry; I began to cry. Even our darkest darkness has its reprieve and Jesus never lets us ascend all the way to Golgotha because he ascended for us.

Waiting in the Wilderness

As I write this article, I am sitting next to my two year old daughter who is battling a case of pneumonia. Over the past two years, Katie and I have been like nomads roaming a dry and arid land in search of water. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we have been circling in the desert and struggling to depend upon manna for the day. Every time we store manna for tomorrow, it becomes infested with maggots; the Lord has taught us that lesson much lately. Living upon our "daily bread" (Matt. 6:11) has been testing as both Katie and I love certainties. Through Karis' illness, however, God has shown us that the only thing certain is his presence and promise. Specifically, he has said he will always be present with us (Matt. 28:20) and he has promised to work all things for our good (Rom. 8:28). Although God will ultimately bring his presence and our good to fruition in its fullest sense, he in the meantime calls us to wait in the desert. We must wander in the wilderness before he brings us to the promised land.

Waiting in the wilderness is not easy. Our American culture of convenience and consumerism suggests that if we are uncomfortable or even miserable that there is something wrong. And yet, the hallmark of the Christ story and our story is that of suffering. When Karis was first diagnosed, Katie and I cried and stopped eating for two days. I distinctly remember looking her in the eye and I said, "We can't keep this up." She nodded in agreement and replied, "We can't live like this." In fifteen minutes, she was giving Karis a bath in the back of our one bedroom apartment with her mother and singing to her as if nothing had changed. At that juncture, we both began coping with Karis' disease in different ways. Katie, to her own confession, dealt mainly through denial. However, I will focus on myself here as I must admit that Katie has not retreated from the wilderness like I have. She is an example of child-like expectation and faith that has humbled me to the point of tears. The way I have dealt with Krabbe has been through despair. I am an overly analytic thinker as it is so I tend to project the worst case scenario in any event. A wheeze is pneumonia. A seizure is a sign of brain loss and further disease progression. An increase in medication is a surrender to the possibility of her not being healed. Since all of these disaster scenarios are too difficult for me to confront emotionally, rather than taking my hurting heart to the Lord, I numb myself through escapism, abstraction, obsession. Each of these defense mechanisms I will describe briefly as each proceeding one is less and less effective at distancing from my emotions.

Escapism keeps me the furthest from my emotions because in escapism I retreat mentally. I do this through food. I do this through books. I do this through movies. I do this through video games. The difficulty lies in the fact that these things in themselves are not bad but when they are surrogates for going to the Lord with your feelings they become addictions and idols. Eventually, I have to leave my alternate reality of pleasure (created through food, books, movies or videogames) and confront the reality of suffering. Not thinking about pain only works for so long. Soon, I have to start thinking and so I retreat by thinking in a distancting kind of way.

Therefore, through abstraction, I withdraw from the pain of the situation by speaking of Karis in detatched language. I can talk in a cerebral way about medications, research, and the nature of the disease. More than that I abstract about how I am doing with the Lord. I have a mind that has a proclivity towards conceptual thinking so I will say all the appropriate theological things: "The Lord is sovereign" or "The Lord can heal." What's worse is I will even abstract about things that pertain to the heart but that I have not practiced with my heart and actions. I can say, "God has taught me that I can be honest with my emotions before him and come messy before him" and yet I haven't done that in two years or longer. I am a hypocrite and I repent.

The final way I retreat from my feelings of despair is through obsession. This mechanism is the least effective and has me the closest to having to confront my emotions over Karis. Since I feel scared, sad, and uncertain about Karis and I have no control over her life, I project those emotions into obsessional fears onto myself. What if I have cancer? What if I die in my sleep? What if I go crazy? Every heart palpitation becomes a heart attack. Every headache a brain tumor. Every racing thought a sign of insanity. All of these irrational fears are my mind's way of taking the fears I have of Karis' life being uncertain and place them on myself. In other words, since I can't control Karis' life nor my feelings over Karis' life being in danger, I, like the unbelieving Israelites in the wilderness, begin circling and circling again and again in my mind with obsessive fears. I obsess over dangers concerning myself because those are things I can control with compulsive thoughts or behaviors whereas Karis is a person who is not under my control.

Eventually, once God removes my escapes, he demonstrates that these obsessive fears are but shrubs and I am in a desert, exposed and naked before him, I begin to feel again. I feel disappointed and angry at God. I feel hurt by God's providence of Karis' sickness. Yet, by being plucked out of my hiding place, I am in the wilderness again. Ironically, when we are in the wilderness is when we are nearest to God for the Holy Spirit led Christ and leads us up into the wilderness (cf. Matt. 4). When we discard our hideouts, we must face our despair. The paradox of the Christian life lies in that we must despair in order to hope. We must be real with our emotions before the God of our emotions can give us his peace. In other words, we must go through the desert if we are to reach the oasis; the Israelites did not reach the promised land without the wilderness.

Stay in the wilderness, my friends. I dedicate this article to my wife who, through humble faith has remained in the desert and taught me what it means to look to the promise.

Basking in the Presence of Christ

Lately, I've been growing a lot in my experience of Christ and his blessings. I've felt the Lord working holiness in my life more than ever before. Paradoxically, I've also felt less holy. In view of our ongoing struggles with our oldest daughter (which you can read about here: ), I have become aware that I have been hiding from the presence of the Lord and supressing my emotions towards him. Consequently, I had felt more of a distance from him over the last couple of years. In God's good providence, he reminded me again of my utter helplessness and of the ways we avoid coming to Jesus with our hearts, especially our hurting hearts. In the following post, I will provide two extreme behaviors we as believers often engage in in order to avoid the person of Jesus. While the behaviors may seem to be completely antithetical to one another, they really have the same goal: distancing us from our savior.

Busyness
How much of our lives are characterized by a mission-oriented, goal-directed, task-focused kind of mentality? In the wake of consumerism and capitalism, we have turned the Protestant work ethic which we inherited from our Puritan forebearers into a kind of workaholic disposition. How do we imagine to experience the presence of Christ if we are continuously distracting ourselves with more projects? Often, we busy ourselves to avoid what the misery that silence brings, the onslaught of what C.S. Lewis called, "the Kingdom of Noise." We are too uncomfortable with ourselves in solitude and so therefore we lack true fellowship with the divine Son of God. Abandoning our work and experiencing Christ's presence is awkward, difficult, and troublesome to our consciences which are crowded with a thousand voices. When it seems as if the White Witch of Narnia has cursed our hearts with a perpetual winter, if we would but seek silence in the Lord, we might, like Edmund, finally hear the other noise properly: the running water of Spring. Instead of turning to returning phone calls for business, staying late in the office, mopping the floors, cutting the grass, raking the yard, we would be better to seek the uncomfortable quiet and authenticity of being before the Lord. Such an experience requires that we admit our vulnerability and helplessness though.

Bailing
If busyness tends to be the sinful proclivity of the Type A personality, bailing is the sinful proclivity of the Type B personality. By bailing, I am referring to escapism. There are many ways we can bail in today's modern world: e-mail, I-Phones, I-Pods, video games, e-books, actual books (a bygone relic), and the internet (more specifically for many: pornography). But really any of God's gifts can be turned into a form of bailing if we are avoiding an authentic, prayerful connection with Jesus. And this form of escapism that I have just mentioned is a more base or convenient kind of bailing. There is a more refined and subtle for which takes primarily in the mind and I call this abstraction. Abstraction is when we detach from the external world and live a life that is entirely in the intellect and world of ideas. Seminary students are excellent at this. I am excellent at this. I can get so attached and obsessed to an idea that I will neglect responsibilities God has placed right in front of me. More importantly, I can idolize my ideas so much (even my ideas about God) that I, ironically move further away from God and not closer to him. I place God in my theological categories and therefore I can harden and distance my heart from him over the real pain I experience over the sickness of Karis. Abstractions are safe. Suffering is not. I feel shame and hurt even writing this but I must repent.

Basking
If we are not to busy ourselves and if we are not to bail, then how do we relate to Christ? How do you relate to a friend? Do you treat that friend like a mission to be accomplished? Do you say, "Let's go to the park so I can check that off my list"? Do you bail from that friend by putting him in an abstract category (hipster, jock, intellectual, leader, etc.) that allows you to pigeonhold him but prevents you from appreciating him in all his variety and versatility? Jesus is not an assignment and he is not an abstraction. He is a Person. May we by God's grace get to know him.

Sunday Reflections on the Gospel in Karis and Kales

I woke up early to a little seven month old bouncing on my chest wanting to play. Thus, I thought I'd write a short list of things I have observed in my children about the gospel. As my readership should know, I have two children: Karis and Kales. Karis is two years old and disabled with a leukodystrophy called Krabbe and Kales is not. Watching both of them, I have learned much about what it means to be a child of God through the gospel. Through Karis' helplessness, I have discovered what it means to be absolutely dependent upon God. Through Kales' playfulness, I have recognized the need to be child-like in my pursuit of God in Christ again. Reflect upon these truths with me this Sunday morning:

5 Lessons of the Gospel I Have Learned through Karis

1. She needs to be fed directly from us just as we must be fed directly from the Father.
2. She cannot bathe herself just as we cannot wash away our own "dirt."
3. She moans when she wants her Daddy to just hold her.
4. She has to be carried and cannot move on her own.
5. She loves to hear Daddy's voice.

5 Lessons of the Gospel I have Learned through Kales

1. She is curious about God's world.
2. She wants to play with her Daddy.
3. She cries out for her Daddy even just to get his attention.
4. She babbles without shame to her Daddy.
5. She laughs when her Daddy calls her by name.

In closing, my new schedule for updating Goldfish in Winter will be three times a week. Please leave a comment if you are a regular reader. It would be helpful to know who those are.

Injustice in the Inbetween: No Country for Old Men as Morality Narrative

While this is a film that has been out for three years, No Country For Old Men (based on the book by Cormac Mccarthy) still serves as a gritty depiction of human nature and the existence of evil. Playing out like Old Testament narrative, the movie unfolds in rural Texas with a drug exchange gone awry as welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon the remains and decides to take the abandoned two million dollars for himself. As a result, Moss is pursued across desert and asphalt all the way into Mexico by Anton Chigurh, an indifferent yet relentless serial killer. The investigation is overseen by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who grapples with the depravity that such a case reveals.

No Country For Old Men is difficult to watch. It is essentially two hours of violence and misery that ends with little resolution or hope. And yet it is one of the most thought-provoking films I have watched and has haunted me with its themes long after the final credits rolled. Like other works by the Coen brothers, it is at once a film about good and evil, justice and injustice, moral dilemma, and ethics.

I mention it here because I think No Country For Old Men represents the dividing line for two different Christian approaches to the arts. Some believers want art to express how the world should be. In general, people operating from this worldview see art (whether it be film, literature, music or whatever) to be explicitly evangelistic or moralistic. What constitutes a good film is one that represents life in sinless fashion.

The other view and the view that I think a Reformed world-in-life view and the Bible itself (as the supreme model of art) supports is the position that art expresses how the world is. The world is a dangerous place filled with violence and men of hatred. Evil at times prospers; wickedness goes unpunished. There is not resolution to every conflict in this present age. Such tension between the fact that the innocent suffer and God is just must cause us to cry out with Job: "It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges--if it is not he, who then is it (9:24)?"

Examining Job's remarks, we can first note that he acknowledges that both the righteous and wicked suffer. Though the film primarily displays the innocence suffering violence, it also shows both the natural consequences of sin and the natural calamity that is bestowed on the wicked. In the case of the former, Llewelyn Moss succumbs to greed by taking the drug money; although he has good motives, his avarice draws him into a path of viciousness and eventually death. With regards to the wicked suffering, Anton Chigurh is involved in a horrific automobile accident. In short, the movie's theodicy, or attempt to resolve how God can be good and suffering still exist, is complex and I believe captures the paradox of good and evil, rewards and consequences in the here-and-now that the Bible espouses.

While there is complexity to the why of human suffering, there is simplicity to the who of human suffering. Job's question is pithy. God rules and reigns over all events no matter how seemingly random. The implication of Job's inquiry is that the only antithesis to God governing all human evil, even evil that befalls the innocent, is chaos. For the majority of No Country for Old Men chaos seems to rule. The entire film is earthy, external, and visceral except for one small, well-paced concluding scene. At the end of the movie, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is describing a dream he had of following a man on horseback through snow, night, and mountains, guided only by a chamber of light. The dream concludes with the Sheriff sitting by a campfire and being blanketed by the father-esque figure who had been leading him through the night. Upon this juncture, the film abruptly ends. Although some may accuse the Coen brothers of a deus ex machina by inserting a dream sequence in the end, I disagree. I think that the transcendent, visionary tone of the dream narration juxtaposes well with the raw, chaotic atmosphere of what precedes it. Besides, deus ex machinas resolve the conflict of the film. The dream does not resolve the conflict. The loss is still real and unchanged but the dream foreshadows a world when the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished. Thus, the nightmare of this existence will be replaced by a dream, but a dream that is reality. Good art stimulates this transcedent longing without minimizing the presence of pain, violence, and evil. In this sense, No Country for Old Men is as true of a film as there is. Our response as the church, should be that of Jeremiah: "Why does the way of the wicked prosper?" Until that day when final resolution arrives, we should not presume to know the mysterious providence of God.