Tag Archives: faith

June 26, 2014 · 6:22 am

God in the stubborn darkness (part 1 of 4)

When I first started calling the Christian faith my own, I had a long list of objections, questions, and doubts. One of these was how to reconcile my understanding and personal experience of depression with what I was learning about Christianity. I (mistakenly) believed that if my faith was strong enough, or my “quiet times with God” profound enough, or my sense of identity secure enough, I wouldn’t struggle with depression.

I thought that Christians equated depression with weakness – or, even worse, with sin.

But I have known depression for years – decades. I have struggled with volatile emotions and hopelessness, fought the demons that insisted life wasn’t worth living and tempted me to cut into my own skin. I wrote in sixth-grade handwriting in a spiral-bound notebook, This can’t be normal. What I’m feeling is too much. I don’t know how to live like this.

I know depression. I know its ugliness, its self-centeredness, its reality of hopelessness and despair. I know emotions that are explosive and debilitating.

I first hurt myself when I was thirteen.  Continue reading →

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June 25, 2014 · 7:07 am

living as a prisoner

Last time, I wrote about motherhood as a “career,” as an identity. But there’s an important second chapter to that discussion.

I am a Christian.

How does my faith come into this? What does identifying as a Christian mean for my struggle to feel worthy, to find value in what I do and who I am? How should my beliefs affect my identity?

I remember when, as a teenager, I first really started learning about the Christian faith – as something other than going to church with my mom and sister on Christmas and Easter. There was a lot of talk in my friends’ Presbyterian youth group about “their identity in Christ” and “finding their worth in Christ.”

These were mysterious ideas to me. My identity was in being a high school senior, a varsity cross-country runner, a violist. My worth resided in my hard and consistent work at everything I tackled, my good grades, and how I was hopefully headed towards an Ivy League school for college.  Continue reading →

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June 22, 2014 · 5:23 pm

deliver me

We must not underestimate our adversary, life itself. Uncomfortable even at good moments, difficult and unfair usually, and a complete nightmare much too often, life will stubbornly resist betterment, always finding new ways of being more than we can stand.

— Ian Frazier

Blessed be the Lord,
who daily bears us up;
God is our salvation. Selah
Our God is a God of salvation,
and to God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death.

— Psalm 68:19-20 (ESV)

This idea (life is hard, and God gives us the strength to persevere) seems to be following me around lately – showing up in tangible ways, like my daily Bible reading email (which I only sometimes open and/or read) or the Reflection in the front of the church bulletin. And I’m not one to really believe in coincidences.  Continue reading →

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May 7, 2014 · 3:12 am

tough week

This has been a tough week. The last several weeks have been tough weeks. Clearly, an ideal time to start a blog – to share the dirt and drama in a public space, for all to see. Luckily, I’ve generally been one to do things that make sense – so this falls right in line. (That last bit was a joke. It’s hard for a depressed person to be funny, so bear with me. And I’m not terribly funny even on a good day.)

My mom used to call me her “long-shot daughter” because I always went after things that she deemed long-shots…you know, the usual sorts of things, like applying to spend a summer studying monkeys in Bali when I had no background in behavioral science or field research; getting into a college that my college counselor told me was a waste of application fee; convincing a publishing house to hire me when I had never edited anyone’s words other than my own; etc.

I won’t bore you with my mottled resume, but wanted to say that doing this – starting a blog at a time when I can barely get dressed in the morning – seems appropriately “long-shot” and therefore, very me.  Continue reading →

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