I think one of the biggest mistakes we make as believers is that we get this idea of required perfection. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that we shouldn’t strive for righteous living. After all, the Bible does say that we should be holy as God is holy. We also realize that the holiness God is requiring, is Christ covering us, because we can’t be holy on our own. Yet we still feel this need to be perfect. Or at least that’s how I was raised as a child in the church. You almost felt ashamed to try to come to God if you weren’t all cleaned up and as they say all buttoned up and perfect. The reality I found was instead that if perfection was what I was waiting for, I would be waiting forever. I can be good enough to come to God, because I struggle daily to do the right things and be the person who I really want to be. I do want to be Christ like, and I spend my life fighting my flesh and my own human nature to reach that goal, but it’s not just the idea of perfection, as in a sinless life, that I think we make a mistake about. Although that’s huge one. I think we also think that we’re supposed to be emotionally perfect. Is that the expectation God has for us?  What about things like depression and anxiety, are these unacceptable for believers to experience or struggle with?

Today I want to look at depression. I’ve always heard that everyone gets down at one time or another. It’s even common now for celebrities or women who’ve had babies who go through postpartum to openly talk about their struggles with depression. If you’re honest with yourself, the majority of the time when you hear someone talk about depression, you see it as a personal weakness. Sure, having a baby or experiencing a great loss may give you a legitimate reason but there’s no excuse for the rest of us or that’s how we often see it.  If we were stronger then we wouldn’t be struggling with depression, right?

Maybe you even think in your own mind, “well I’m stronger than them because I don’t have to take medicine” or “I’m a better believer because I’m not letting these things get to me”? But is that actually true? Is depression a condition of weak-minded people? Is it a condition for those with weak faith?  Is depression something we should look down on people for experiencing? Why am I asking these questions?  Well, honestly it is because I wonder. I wonder because recently, I’ve been experiencing my own valley.  

Funny, I didn’t even want to call it depression until I realized I couldn’t deny what I was feeling. In desperation I prayed and cried out to God because I didn’t want to take medicine for it. I still don’t.  Not because I think medication is bad (no I know that it benefits many and I do not look negatively on anyone who chooses that route for treatment) but I wanted to take a different route to avoid any health risks associated with medicine.  Also, I preferred dealing with my feelings in a different way – counseling, journaling, prayer, support from others, etc.…. Yet sitting here writing today make me realize that I had some very unhealthy attitudes towards depression. I kept asking myself what’s wrong with me, why am I not stronger than this? I literally didn’t want to tell anybody what was going on because it was something I felt ashamed of. Here I am being weak, or was it really weakness?

I was sitting in church and God reminded me of something. Do you know how many of the psalms aren’t positive? I had never thought about it before. I mean we all know lamentations is in the Bible, but do we acknowledge the existence of lamentations in our life. That it’s natural and that it’s a part of the human experience. We all read the stories in the Bible where we see people like Abraham and Sarah struggle with infertility for years, surely that caused periods of depression and agony for them. We read of so many people who had devastating situations in the Bible yet somehow, I think that we’ve sainted them all in our minds. It’s like we don’t think about the pain, the sorrow, the depression, and the agony of what they went through and how that affected them. For goodness sakes, Mary watched her son be brutally murdered in front of her eyes. She experienced grief, unimaginable grief and even though we see it played out over and over in the Bible where people have lost or been hurt, somehow, we forget that they must have felt just as we feel. I’m sure there were periods of extreme joy, and periods of extreme depression. 

Often times when I was younger, I wondered why some of these stories would be included in scripture when they didn’t seem to have a happy ending, or have beautiful and wonderful events. What was the point? Why were they included in the bible?  I think today I finally understand. God needed to show us that it was OK to not be OK. That our stories don’t have to be perfect or beautiful to still be a part of his divine plan.

He can use the flawed and the broken to clearly display his glory and yes, his grace. King David in so many of the psalms painted a clear picture of how God in that relationship with him was played out in real life.  Not always lovely, easy, or perfect.  You see people get this idea that David was anointed and then he just was king but if you read in scriptures there were many years in between and many devastating and confounding things that happened. Something’s happened to him that he did not cause but were caused by outside things such as Saul’s hate and jealousy of him which drove him to go after David. David’s great friendship and loss of his best friend. Jonathan. David’s devastation and his own personal relationships and poor choices in them. Through lusting and murder and repentance because of it. We even see the struggle later in his own children’s lives all played out in scripture. This was not a short story, it was not a perfect story, instead it was a story to show that God was with David always through every moment joy and sorrow, wins and losses. You see this in the way that David wrote and praised.  Interestingly enough, there are 42 individual psalms of lament and 16 national psalms of lament, the whole nation mourned together. One site online said 70% of psalms are laments. Yes, over half, is that telling you something about how much of life is going to be happy mountaintop moments and how much of it’s going to be walking in the valley or on the level plateau. 

I’ve heard people say that they are irritated at others for only coming to God when everything is bad and rarely coming to him when things are great, but maybe that’s not a pattern that’s so unusual. Don’t get me wrong we should still praise God in great moments, come to him often and thank him, but maybe there’s a higher percentage of challenging moments than there are easy or great ones. Why wouldn’t I call out to God when I was in trouble or when I was in pain? Just to prove a point that I’m only going to ask of him when things are good. It’s so silly these things we put on ourselves because of other people’s opinions and expectations or our own. The truth is he is showing us in scripture that even a Psalm of lament is still a praise. You see I can sing here in my pain just as clearly as I can in my joy and victory. The psalms of lament aren’t all negative, they just say that I’m feeling depression or agony, however I recognize even in that, that God is still good and he’s still God. I’m still praising even if I’m saying the truth about how I feel. When did it become wrong to be honest with God about our emotions and thoughts.

I’m writing today to advocate for God, a God that loved us so much that he gave us a scripture that shows us that life is hard, that it could be messy and painful and yes, we can make an awful lot of mistakes, but the end of the story isn’t determined by the sum of the days of our life. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the darkest valley, I can still sing here my song of lament and it will be pleasing to the Lord. It doesn’t matter if I’ve made mistakes or done things that I knew I shouldn’t have, he hears my song of repentance and my desire to try to be better but needing his grace, mercy, and help. We are not weak if we have struggled with depression, we are not somehow less than. We are just as closely held and loved by our Savior in those moments when we are in the miry clay as when we’re standing on the mountain top. Don’t let anyone tell you different. 

If you don’t believe me read the scripture because you’ll find it very clearly written. Remember even in the middle of the darkest night, there is no darkness that is so dark that his light can’t reach you. He’ll send little nuggets of hope. We just have to hold on and keep coming even if it doesn’t seem like we have anything great to say. Some of the songs are brutal, our hearts bleeding out in painful praise.  These are our laments.  Yes, they are still considered praises to God. So, praise him where you are, don’t worry about what anybody thinks about it. I’m not going to anymore. I’m also not going to worry about having a story that’s amazing or trying to change the one I have had written into something I think is better, I’m just going to try to make today the best and not worry about the past or even the future. I’ll leave those in God’s hands. Honestly, todays about all I can handle right now.

My prayer is that you can clearly see that perhaps the perfection that Christ has for us isn’t quite what we think we’re supposed to have in our own minds. He understands that we have pain, struggle, depression, anxieties, and he clearly gives us a place to come to be safe and to find rest even in those moments. Come to him as you are unashamed. Come to him where you can come unafraid. Sing your song whether it’s a song of lament, absolution, repentance, or unabashed joy. He just wants you to sing it.  He wants your heart, even if it’s in a million pieces, even if it’s black and hard a stone, he just wants you as you are. I’m so glad that God showed me and reminded me of that today.

Scriptures: Micah 7:8, Matt 11:28, 1 Peter 5:7, Psalms 23:4, Psalms 9:9, Psalms 40:1-2, Psalms 34:18, Romans 8:38-39, 2 Cor 1:3-4, Lamentations 3:18-26