Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness (17 page)

This liberation from judgment frees us to live for the One who died for us. Having glimpsed the penalty we deserved and the love we received, how could we want anything else? So we look to Jesus, who is now both our redeemer and the one we are privileged to imitate and follow. We observe the radical way he handled personal injustice. Jesus
never
was angry because of what was done to him. Instead, he taught us to bless our enemies (Luke 6:27–31). He was only angry when leaders led others down a destructive path or money-changers shamed his Father’s temple. His secret was that he was passionate about his Father’s glory, not his own. He completely trusted his Father’s judgments to be good and true. He chose to give up his status as judge and entrusted it solely to his Father.

When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. (1 Pet. 2:23)

Anger is always a form of imitation. Either we are imitating the way mercy trumps anger in the character of Jesus, or we are mimicking the destructive anger of Satan (John 8:44). There are no other choices.

Having turned to God to know him better, consider your own heart again. Your task is to judge yourself before you judge others.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own
eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matt. 7:3–5)

Look at yourself earlier, longer, and harder than you do other people.

This is hard any time, but anger makes it even more difficult because there really may have been an injustice. With anger, finger-pointing is natural. We are absolutely persuaded that what happened is wrong and we are right. But think about the nature of anger. Anger
always
thinks it is right, but it is almost always wrong. Isn’t it true that the vast majority of anger is destructive and hurtful? And isn’t it true that self-seeking anger will ultimately bring misery on the angry person because anger is contrary to the way God intended us to be?

Ask yourself, “What do I love?” Or, “What rights of mine have been violated?” Personal respect, appreciation, admiration, control, power, impact, being right, revenge, comfort, privacy? If your anger has lasted more than ten minutes, you will find that your own heart is not innocent.

Now connect this to your relationship with God. Your worst relationship with other people reveals your heart before God. If we don’t love others, we don’t love God. If we are angry with others, we are standing against God. With our complaining and grumbling, we have set up an implicit test for God: Will he give us what we want or not? We have made life about us, and when we do, we are doomed to a life of perpetual dissatisfaction.

Notice the spiritual warfare that rages under the surface. You are listening to diabolic voices that question God’s love and power. You don’t believe that he will love you well or use his power to judge on your behalf. Wherever we find anger that isn’t handled quickly, we will find Satan masterminding division (Eph. 4:26–27).

God responds to us in a very different way than we respond to others. “You, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Ps. 86:15). He calls murderers to lead his church as a way to demonstrate his “unlimited patience” to those who believe in him (1 Tim. 1:16). He washes the feet of disciples who betray and reject him (John 13). And he delights in forgiving us because his forgiveness demonstrates that he is truly the Holy God who doesn’t treat us as we deserve.

To angry people, God says, “Confess your selfish anger; trust me and obey.” Jesus told a story about a man who was forgiven a great debt—more than a lifetime’s worth of wages. As soon as he was released from the debt, he tracked down a man who owed him the equivalent of a couple of dollars and demanded immediate payment (Matt. 18:21–35). When the king heard about it, the ungrateful man’s injustice so angered him that he withdrew his forgiveness and threw the man in prison. If the man’s actions make
you
angry, realize that Jesus is also warning you—“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” Through Jesus, we have been forgiven for many lifetimes’ worth of debt against our Heavenly Father, yet we want those who slight us to pay up immediately.

When that story fits (and it fits us all at some time), it shows that we don’t truly grasp God’s grace and mercy to us through Christ. We treat others the way we think we have been treated. If we think God has been stingy with us, we will be stingy toward others. But there is another way. Those who know that they have been forgiven will be generous, eager to imitate Christ by covering the offenses of others (Prov. 19:11).

If there has been a serious offense, Scripture is very practical. Talk to the offending person with love. If he doesn’t listen, ask others for help to reconcile (Matt. 18:15–16). Certainly, love will take
different forms in different relationships, and it is always wise to get advice on how to love, but the goal remains love.

Live like a person who has been released from a huge debt. Or go one step further: live as though you owe others, not as though they owe you (Rom. 13:8).

Anger is one reason why people hold onto depression.

When I’m depressed, pain is my friend. I wallow in pain. It’s what I am familiar with. I’ll tell you that I hate my pain and that there is nothing good about it, but I still hold onto it. I’m so dead inside, so empty of any enthusiasm or hope. My pain reminds me that I’m alive. It allows me to be angry.
¹

Remember that anger is devious and hard to find. You can be “doing” anger without even feeling it. Pray, “Lord, search me.”

Since prayer is one of the places our heart is revealed, allow it to test you. If you can meditate on the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13) and make it your own, it is evidence that you are putting up a good fight against lingering anger.

For a succinct passage of Scripture that summarizes what has been written here (and more), read James 4. Notice that it teaches us to say, “If it is the Lord’s will.” How many times have you had huge expectations, only to have them dashed on the rocks? How different would it have been if you had begun by saying, “If it is the Lord’s will”?

Where do you see anger in your life?

Depression can bring out our weakness, and most men prefer to avoid showing weakness, but once Jim, who had recently turned fifty, felt like it was safe to be open there seemed to be no end to his sadness.

“I thought I would have a more satisfying job.

“I thought marriage would be bliss, and it was divorce.

“I thought I would look forward to a mature relationship with my kids, but sometimes I don’t even like them.

“I thought I would have a financial cushion by this point, but alimony and lay-offs make each month hard.

“I thought God would help me ...”

He had dreams, lots of them, and they were all slipping away.

Hope is risky. The more you look forward to something, the greater the chance of being let down. Set your heart on a sun-soaked day at the beach and an afternoon shower is very disappointing. It seems safer to take the more pessimistic route and anticipate a monsoon. Then, at least, your hopes won’t be dashed.

No doubt you have had your hopes rise and fall in your life. We all have, and it always hurts. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Prov. 13:12). For some people, when dreams crash, they just dream something new. Others, however, at some point decide that they have had enough. They decide never to hope again.

Everyone who goes through suffering should be alert to hopelessness and consider God’s response to it. With depression, where hopelessness tends to be so prominent, this is critical.

Hope is distinctly human. Regardless of how difficult your life has been, you can remember when you had hopes and dreams. You looked forward to the future. Children anticipate a favorite dessert, a special trip, a birthday party. Teens hope for school vacations, weekends, and times with friends.

In business they call it vision—the ability to think about things that don’t yet exist. Experts say this is essential for leadership. More popularly, we call it imagination. Our language is rich with words about hope: wish, yearning, dream, anticipation, desire, eagerness, expectation, goal, ambition, aim, target.

We live in the present. The past can weigh us down, but the future pulls us along. There is a destination to life. We live a story that has a past, present, and future.

To live without hope is to live without a future. It is
almost
impossible to imagine such a life. Cynics and pessimists, however, mock hope, as if we can live without it. Those who are depressed try to kill it because it has betrayed them.

Have you ever made a decision to no longer hope? Some people can remember the exact moment. For others, hope just gradually erodes as disappointments mount. Either way, you feel that hope has given you as much pain as you can handle. It makes sense to either kill it or let it die of natural causes. Only a fool, you think, would continue to hope when so many dreams have proved unattainable.

What you don’t realize is that so much of what we associate with life itself is bound up with hope. Hope is the future that reaches into the present. When you see nothing ahead of you in the future, there is no reason to get out of bed, love, or work now. Kill hope and you kill more than you anticipated. You thought it would make life less painful, but all attempts to kill hope kill both future hopes and present joys. If you want to be freed of all disappointments in the future, you have to be unaffected now because what if, in the future, you lose the things you love? Do you have a spouse whom you love? A child? The only way to keep safe is to be detached.

If you kill hope, you think you are protecting yourself, but, instead, you doom yourself to lifelessness. If you let hope gradually die without putting up a fight, you end up in the same place. It renders the present meaningless. Without hope, you feel like the walking dead.

If you have a commitment to hopelessness or a reluctance to fight against it, it is killing you. You know that, but you stay the course anyway. Is it momentum? Tradition? Stubbornness? Whatever the reason, there is another way. You must be willing to do battle here.

There is a reason for discussing dashed hopes right after anger. Although disappointments lead to surrender rather than lashing out, anger and hopelessness eventually meet.

Dashed hopes begin with a simple desire. You want something, and what you want is probably a good thing, such as marriage, relationships, a job, health. Gradually the desire gets stronger. It seems attainable. You begin to imagine it. You can almost taste it. And then it vanishes.

When we don’t get what we really want, we get frustrated (part of the spectrum of anger). If we can blame it on a person, our response is easier to recognize as anger. But if it feels like circumstances have conspired against us, there is no human face to attach our anger to. As a result, there is no yelling, screaming, or other sign that we readily classify as anger. But if you listen carefully to yourself, you might notice anger in the way that God is less relevant to you. You have marginalized him. You have pushed him away, given him the cold shoulder. You can be indifferent to him. Perhaps you turn toward him for
some
things, but you don’t trust him with anything related to your disappointment. This is the cold version of anger.

Look for dashed hopes to be mingled with anger, but realize that they usually don’t stop there. Dashed hopes can lead to frustration with God. Frustration with God leads to self-imposed spiritual isolation or withdrawal, and spiritual isolation leads to self-pity.

The prophet Jonah illustrates this in his biblical autobiography. As an ancient Israelite, his hope was that Israel would once again reach the heights it had attained under King Solomon, and Israel’s enemies would be defeated. Although the kingdom was doing relatively well at the time, other prophets were already prophesying about an exile that would come at the hands of a country from “beyond Damascus” (Amos 5:27). All indicators pointed to Assyria.

Jonah’s mission was to go to Assyria and “preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me” (Jon. 1:2). It seemed like an ideal job that dovetailed with his own dreams: preach judgment against Israel’s potential oppressors. But Jonah resisted preaching because he knew that the God of Israel was merciful. Notice the message—the pagan nation was being warned and given an opportunity to change. Then, if the people in the Assyrian city of Nineveh actually repented, which Jonah deemed likely, God would spare them and Jonah’s dreams would be in jeopardy.

After a brief but notable detour, Jonah finally preached a barebones sermon that, when you read it, sounds unimpressive and unconvincing, but the people responded dramatically. They repented en masse, and God had compassion for them.