Good morning…
“I don’t understand anxiety and depression,” she said after returning home from a funeral. Our daughter’s 22-year-old brain was trying to process why her good friend’s mother would take her own life. We both agreed. Because it is not happening to us, it is impossible for any of us to comprehend the swirling storm of anxiety and depression raging inside another person.
Feeling drawn to put some meat on the bones of our discussion, I pulled out my signed copy of The Hidden Life Awakened and read aloud from page 56. “Living with depression is a horrible way to live,” says Betty Skinner looking back on her 42-year-old self, “because it is a living death. It felt like a twenty-pound weight has been strapped on my back and I just couldn’t get it off. Nothing excited or challenged me. I could’t sleep. I lost my appetite because food lost its flavor. I couldn’t concentrate. I would pick up a book but couldn’t read it; I just held it. It was a tremendous struggle just to exist. Those closest to me couldn’t help because they felt very threatening, so I pushed them away. I withdrew into a void of nothingness, which is the pit of despair – the weight of depression.”
“For me,” Betty continues, “the movement toward healing required a complete surrender. God is always saying, ‘If you give Me everything, I will give you everything.’ It is a constant coming, a constant offering, a constant struggle to let go in order to move to a deeper communion with God.”
Thinking for a moment our daughter quietly said, “Read again that part about ‘constant.'” So I did. “It is a constant coming, a constant offering, a constant struggle to let go in order to move to a deeper communion with God.”
Now it is the hard work of healing handed over to grievers. Constantly come. Constantly offer. Constantly struggle to let go. Move into a deeper communion with God. Our private, persistent prayer becomes: Be merciful to me, O Lord, for I am calling on you constantly (Psalm 86:3, NLT).
…Sue…
