Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness (19 page)

The problem, of course, is that it is not this easy. Even if you could find some strengths and some good within yourself—which is almost impossible when you are depressed—they don’t seem like enough to counterbalance everything that makes you feel so worthless. People who care about you have already affirmed you, and it hasn’t made any difference. There is a deeper problem that must be confronted.

Reorient yourself by recalling the nature of the human heart. Many problems come at us, but they don’t just encounter a blank interior. They are interpreted by hearts that are constantly busy. When depressed, we feel like an empty shell, but we are doing something. Remember, the heart is always choosing.

Try reframing your experience with this in mind. For example, instead of thinking that you are oppressed by the expectations that others have draped over you, recognize that the heart
chooses
to live under the standards of others. Instead of thinking that you are distressed because people aren’t pleased with you, recognize that you have chosen a style of life in which you live for approval. We don’t want to experience failure and shame; we don’t choose that. But we
do
choose to trust in other people and their judgments. It comes down once again to the deepest question of all: who will you trust?

Scripture indicates that we come from a long line of incorrigible idolaters. Long ago it was Baal, but Baal was never the favorite idol. The true favorites have always been money and people. These two continue to be the most popular objects of worship. Why do we choose these idols? Because we think they can satisfy. We think they can give us what we want.

Let’s apply this to depression. We want admiration, respect, honor, influence, kindness, or love. We could buy it, but we still need people to give us what we want. So we live based on their expectations, opinions, and standards. Other people become our gods. Our purpose, of course, is not to be subservient to them. Our goal is to receive what we want by appeasing them. Give them what they want and they will give you what you need.

But the devil is in the details. The fine print in this arrangement promises two things. First, other people will never satisfy. You can never measure up well enough, and you can never get enough of what you want from them. Second, you become a servant to whatever you trust in. If you trust in money, you will slavishly try to get it and worry when you can’t. If you trust in people, your life will be devoted to meeting their expectations.

This isn’t to say that wanting respect, love, and other things we get from relationships is wrong. Idolatry is usually a good thing that has gone haywire. You can tell that something has gone wrong when you move from the goal of God’s glory to your own. Remember, we want to make it about us, but it’s not.

Sometimes it is hard to detect the gradual deification of people in our lives. Our hearts erect the pedestals for these idols while our backs are turned, but there is a way to alert yourself to what’s going on. When you are lukewarm toward God, or when you are not fixing your eyes on Jesus, then you can be sure that idolatry has taken root. If you are not worshipping the true God, you are worshipping something else.

An even easier strategy is just to
assume
that you erect idols. Our hearts can believe the right things but still be double-minded. Like Aaron and Israel when they were waiting for Moses, they believed that the true God had delivered them from Egypt, but they also built a golden calf.

If failure and shame fit your experience, then you most likely have people-gods. You want something from them, and they haven’t delivered. Depression doesn’t exempt you from the problems that afflict us all, and all of us have an instinct that turns us away from God and toward people.

At first, the isolation of depression suggests that we are distanced from and unmoved by other people. But other people play a huge part in our self-judgments. A person truly isolated—marooned on a deserted island—does not have to negotiate through shame and failure. There are no people recounting personal failures, and there simply isn’t anyone around to trust. But you don’t live on a deserted island. You may try to psychologically escape to one, but people are still around, and their presence reminds you that you don’t measure up. On top of that, no matter where you try to flee, your own heart goes with you. You can’t escape that with a change in geography.

Low self-worth and a sense of failure and shame do not simply arise because we feel bad about ourselves. We have also trusted in other people, and we think that
they
feel bad about us. Perhaps we have experienced overt rejection from someone especially important to us, but the truth is that we don’t really need anyone to speak against us.
We
can tell when we have failed. We know people who do it better than we do, are more attractive than we are, seem to have more intimate relationships, better jobs, and so on. It is as if we are born with an innate ability to poll the world on hundreds of different measures, and on the ones most important to us, we rate average or worse. We fear that we are ordinary.

You realize, of course, that when we talk about trusting in anything or anyone other than God, we are talking about sin. Please don’t run away from that. Sin has been given a bad name by those who stand in hypocritical judgment of others. The reality is that the Spirit himself is the one who convicts us of sin. God is pleased when we see sin and confess it.

One of the blessings of seeing sin is that we can actually do something about it. We can call out for mercy, find it, and change. The Spirit has been given so that we no longer have to be slaves to sin. There is a way out.

When in doubt, the way out is to get back to basic purpose statements. “I belong to God. The way I can honor, please, and glorify him is by trusting him and responding to him with obedience.” Love God, love neighbor. Trust and obey. In God’s good plan, he has determined that these ordinary spiritual acts would be the pinnacle of true humanness.

Trust.
When we put our trust in the judgments of others, we are saying something to God. We are saying, “I don’t trust you.” “You are not enough.” You believe that God offers you heaven, but can he satisfy your ever-growing psychological desires? Can he make you an “A,” at least in some areas, when you feel like a “C-minus”?

But that’s missing the point. Our purpose is not about us; it is about God. For this reason, God seems to prefer the average and below average. Otherwise it would be about our talents and abilities.

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and
the despised things ... . “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” (1 Cor. 1:26–28, 31)

When I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:10)

“Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the L
ORD
, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the L
ORD
. (Jer. 9:23–24)

Life is not about my résumé; it is about ways to extend the fame of Jesus. And one way to do this is to say that God is more than enough. After all, he
is
love. It has been proven at the cross. All other loves are, at best, imitations that point back to the original rather than usurp it.

To trust is to say that we need Jesus. Our search for self-satisfaction has been a failure, and we now turn to the One who, all along, has been our true destination.

There is a certain paradox in trusting God. When we trust him, we are saying that we are entirely inadequate, which is true though it doesn’t do wonders for our self-image. But when we trust him, it is also as if we have arrived home. All is well. Yes, there may be many problems, but we are home, and the comfort and joy of home reduces the problems of life to the level of hassles. We have the Father’s love, and we know that he is the ruling king. That is enough.

Confess.
As you turn back to the Lord, speak your confession to him. Tell him that your heart is prone to wander, your tendencies toward erecting idols incorrigible. Confession is speaking the truth about our hearts to the Lord. Although Scripture encourages us to make it a daily feature of our conversations with God (Matt. 6:9–13), it is a neglected discipline.

A rule of thumb in confession is to keep at it until you have inklings of hope or joy. Confession is not a time to grovel. It is a time to trust in the God who delights in forgiving because it brings him glory. Don’t forget the story of the joy the shepherd takes in the one lost sheep that is found.

If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost. (Matt. 18:12–14)

Yes, you wander off, but focus on the happiness of the shepherd. It isn’t what you expected.

Obey.
Our response to God’s love is summarized as loving our neighbors. This simple expression of obedience is a profound treatment for failure and shame. At first it seems counterintuitive. After all, our problem was that we fell in love with what we could receive from others; it would make more sense to detach from them. This love, however, is different. It is the love of a person freed rather than enslaved. Having received the love of Christ, we are willing to say to other people, “My desire to love you will outweigh my desire to be loved [honored, appreciated, respected] by you.”

Can you imagine the freedom in this? No longer are we dominated by popular opinion. Perceived rejection doesn’t control us as it once did. Instead, we keep coming back to the question, “What form will love take now?”

Notice the connection to anger. If anger is a judgment we make about others, low self-worth seems to be a judgment we make about ourselves. We say, “I am wrong.
I
deserve blame.” The tie to anger is even more apparent when we rename low self-esteem as self-hatred or self-loathing.

When you turn to Christ, these judgments become less important. You don’t have to say, “I am special because God loves me,” which is true but not the critical issue. And you don’t have to say, “What a miserable, idolatrous wretch,” which is also true but also not the critical issue. Instead, you simply think less often about yourself. Your successes and failures are still noticeable, but they don’t encumber you the way they once did.

Most depressed people have active consciences.

Jim really wanted to do the right thing before God. He was a man of integrity, spiritual disciplines, and good reputation. After a sermon about confession and repentance he decided to set aside some time every day to grow in those particular disciplines.

It started well. If you don’t do anything horribly wrong, as is the case with Jim, you might need a few minutes to warm up; but once you see one area of sin, you can spot twenty, and Jim could spot twenty. No problem yet. But that evening he was bothered by his inadequacy as a confessee and vowed to do it better the next day.

If time and effort were the criteria, he definitely did better, but he felt worse. He felt like all his good efforts were tainted by self-righteousness and pride, and he just couldn’t get it right. So he tried harder.

Within a month he was a shell of his former self. He identified it as depression. He felt lost. He knew he would never measure up and have a pure heart in his spiritual work.

Failure and shame are signposts. Listen, and you will hear them say, “You are not okay before God.” The principle is this: if you see a problem in your relationships with other people, you will find the identical problem in your relationship with God. If you are angry with others, you will find anger with God. If you don’t love others, you don’t love God. If you feel as if you can’t measure up to the expectations of yourself and others, then you feel as if you have not measured up to God’s standards either. What we call failure, shame, and not measuring up before other people, we call guilt before God.

To understand this, you have to remember that we are not always aware of the things that influence us. At this moment there are thousands of people who have somehow contributed to your life. They have affected your present emotions, thoughts, and dreams, but you are not aware of them. It should come as no surprise that the Living God, before whose face we always live, has an impact on us whether we are consciously thinking about him or not.

“Laura has gained so much weight—she looks terrible!”

When you say this to someone other than Laura, you don’t feel guilty. But what if Laura overhears? You will either never want to see Laura again or apologize endlessly. Why is it that you were oblivious to your wrongdoing one moment and ashamed of it the next? The difference, of course, is the presence of Laura.

Scripture teaches that we all know God, but we try to keep that knowledge at bay. For those who successfully suppress that knowledge, God seems very far away. Guilt, too, is a distant memory. For the rest of us, however, in whom the knowledge of God continues to impress itself, guilt is palpable and it affects us more than we think. And that is a good sign—it is a gift! It means that God is on the move in your life, giving you grace to see sin and change instead of being blind to it.