What Can Depression Teach Us?
Or, How God Uses Trauma, Pain, and Regret to Show Us a Better Way
Depression is a uniquely personal form of suffering. No two stories are exactly the same. The following recounts my experience with depression after my wife’s cancer diagnosis. Your situation will be different, no doubt. Some of you have walked through such darkness yourselves. Others will find familiar descriptions that, while useful, remain mostly abstract. Whatever your story, perhaps you will find something valuable in what you read that is helpful to you, and in turn equips you with kindness and understanding towards others.
Last October I was confronted with the unavoidable realization that I was depressed, and had been for some time.
It was a Thursday morning. My phone alarm went off, and I stumbled out of bed. I got dressed. I left our apartment and drove to an early morning breakfast meeting. I was there to listen to an upset church member with legitimate complaints about the way he had recently been treated by his one of his leaders, namely, me. He ordered a bagel with cream cheese but didn’t eat much of it. I drank black coffee while I sat across from him in the booth. I ate nothing.
Afterwards, instead of driving to my office, I went home. It was only 8:30am. Yet, all I could think about was getting back in bed and going to sleep. So that’s what I did. I laid down and fell asleep immediately.
Waking up a couple of hours later, I thought back to a conversation I had with my wife two weeks before.
“You have a lot of pain you’re not dealing with,” she said. We were standing in our kitchen, late afternoon light softening the contrast on the black and white checkered linoleum flooring.
“Maybe.” I paused, before continuing, “I think I’m just struggling with some anger about it all.” Though true, my statement missed the core of the issue in a way that hers didn’t. I leaned against the wood-patterned formica countertop and considered her words. I didn’t want to admit that she was right (but let’s be honest, she usually is—especially if it has to do with me).
Aimee looked at me. She was persistent. She was wearing a baseball cap and red lipstick. It was a way to maintain her femininity despite hair loss from chemo.
“You need to talk to someone.”
I didn’t deny it. But the statement perplexed me. As a pastor and biblical counselor, I had spent the last decade building collegial relationships with most of the mental health professionals I would recommend in a situation like mine. In many ways, I was a peer. I was just as likely to teach with them or collaborate on a writing project. But now, it was difficult to think of someone with whom I could share my burdens. It was too risky. There was too much at stake, personally and professionally, to entrust my heartache to another person.
Yet as I lay in my bed that morning, ceiling fan circling lazily overhead, my body warm from sleep, my need overcame my hesitations.
I reached under my pillow and grabbed my phone. I called the number for a counseling center I knew and respected. The call went to voicemail. I left a message. But just to be sure, I also emailed a summary of my situation to the counseling center’s director, Bruce. He was an older, kindly man I first met several years ago over breakfast. I remember he wore a loose sport coat, his glasses perched low on the bridge of his nose. He brought his own coffee cup to the diner where we met. I liked that about him.
Later that day, Margret, the office manager (who was also Bruce’s wife) called me back. Bruce was unavailable, but I could meet with Bill, another counselor, if I wanted to. That sounds great, I said, and she passed along his phone number. I called Bill the next morning.
I was at the hospital. It was a treatment day. I was sitting on a deep-set couch in the atrium of the cancer center where Aimee received her chemo. The space was a large, semicircular skybridge that connected different buildings within the hospital. It was quiet, bright, and airy, but with lots of foot traffic. There were doctors, nurses, techs, patients, and family members—heading to the parking garage, transferring to their rooms, picking up their lunch at the cafe.
The hum of activity concealed what this place was for so many: a reminder of loss. I sat there while Aimee was in the large infusion room upstairs. Our friend Anne Lincoln was with her that day for support. I waited for them outside, handling the necessary administrative burdens of cancer-stricken families.
I dialed the number Margret had given me. I expected Bill’s voicemail. Instead, the line clicked live and a voice spoke.
“Hello?”
“Uh, yes. My name is Brady Goodwin. Margret gave me your number. I’m calling about scheduling counseling for myself. She mentioned that you had availability.” I was talking too fast.
“Yes, hello Brady. Margret told me she gave you my info. Good to hear from you.”
“You too.” I continued to speak. “I’ve been having a pretty hard time lately. My wife has breast cancer, and it’s been really tough. I’m a pastor as well, and that adds its own burdens.” I stopped talking, but I felt a sense of urgency, like I needed to tell him more.
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks.”
The conversation continued a minute or two more. We set a time to meet, and said goodbye.
A few weeks later, I was in the waiting room before my first appointment with Bill. Soft music played overhead. It was accompanied by the low whisper of a white noise machine. The counseling office was on the top floor of a nondescript building off one of the busier highways in Dallas. Its entrance stood at the end of a long hallway. A large print reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son hung on the wall opposite the entry. Office plants were in all the normal places.
Across the chair from where I sat there was a side table containing several brochures (“Where Has ‘Happy’ Gone?” read one). I made myself a cup of green tea and sat back down.
A few minutes later, the door opened. In walked Bruce, the counseling director. He looked at me generically for a moment before recognizing me.
“Oh, hello Brady. Good to see you.”
“Thanks, Bruce. It’s good to be here.”
“You’re meeting with Bill? Good. He’s a good man, and loves the Lord.”
“I’m glad to be meeting with him. It’s been a tough year. My wife has breast cancer.”
“Oh, yes that’s right. I’m so sorry about that.” Bruce truly seemed to mean that. He paused for moment, before signaling his need to end our chat, “Ok—I need to run. Nice seeing you.”
“You too.”
Bruce walked toward his office, and the front door opened once more. Another man walked in. It was Bill.
“Brady?”
Bill was clean-shaven, in his mid 50s, with short, sandy hair. He had a soft, quiet voice. He shook my hand and smiled before saying, “Good to meet you. Come on back.”
We sat down in Bill’s office. A large window overlooked the interstate adjacent to the office building, and beyond that the residential areas that make up northeast Dallas. The room was filled with the kind of warm, late morning sunlight that can induce a nap. Bill sat in a leather office chair. I found a spot on a loveseat opposite him. I grabbed the decorative pillow and instinctively placed it across my lap.
Sitting there in that first session felt both familiar and a touch disorienting. Typically it was someone else sitting across from me getting ready to open up about the hard things in their life. But here I was instead. I was nervous. I could almost hear my heart beat. I could feel my emotions in my throat.
“So—why don’t you start by telling me what brings you here today.”
So I told him.
Of course there was the cancer. That was the lead story. How to quantify the impact? It’s like trying to describe the damage a tornado inflicts while the winds are still dismantling your home. Afterward one is left to survey the wreckage and begin rebuilding efforts. But what about the time to grieve? To mourn? To be able to express aloud, “This is isn’t the way I wanted my life to turn out?” Cancer forces a person to figure out how to get busy saving a life. It is less accommodating when it comes to reckoning with the fact that keeping someone alive (yourself, your wife, your child) was necessary in the first place.
But there was also several years of pain in ministry. Some of that pain was unavoidable. People experience crises, imperfect helpers respond, mistakes are made, conclusions are formed, words are said, damage is done. This is the shrapnel that hits every pastor or minister at some point in their lives, no matter how effective or faithful they are in their work. It is the wounding that if left unaddressed, ultimately leads so many to leave ministry for other, less emotionally hazardous lines of work.
Some of my pain, however, came from sources closer to home. There was pain from relationships where I thought I could be truly honest, but turned out to be unsafe. There were professional ambitions that remained unrealized and out of reach, despite my self-perceived experiences or qualifications. There was disillusionment from years of idealistic yearning that saw a pure picture of ministry as it could be (at least from my point of view), yet which was never truly how it actually turned out.
And how could I forget the deadness in my emotional and spiritual life? That was a major feature of the preceding months that had now reduced my capacity for normal work to a fraction of its previous output. Before, I could teach, write, counsel, strategize, and lead with energy to spare. I had spent years sharpening the skills necessary to do all this, and to keep doing it, week after week, month after month. I did it through two graduate degrees, twelve years of full-time ministry, all with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership. I often felt close to God. I possessed a deep knowledge of the Bible that I used to encourage and help others.
But now those abilities seemed like a distant memory. My engagement with God was virtually non-existent apart from professional responsibilities. I could patch together little more than three or four hours of conscious engagement in my work before finding myself unable to proceed. I would sit in meetings with a placid veneer that poorly hid my vacant gaze. When I came home from work, I was largely unavailable to my family. I would seek escape through TV, sleep, or alcohol. Whatever I thought could quiet what I felt inside.
Mostly however, I was just really sad. Sad, and angry. Angry at everyone. Angry at God. I didn’t know what to do with everything churning inside me. What I did before to deal with all of this wasn’t working anymore. I don’t think it ever worked.
I stopped talking.
I had been going for at least forty-five minutes. Bill listened the entire time, taking a few sparse notes. Now it was his turn to speak. He exhaled slowly before responding. He narrowed his eyes and said simply:
“That’s a lot.”
He wasn’t dismissive. He was understanding. In a short phrase, he acknowledged the many ways suffering had touched my life. He continued:
“You know, I would expect a person to come to counseling for any one of these issues. And you have all of them. And—your wife has cancer. I’m surprised you're functioning at the level you are.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Aimee says I look dead. I mean, I feel dead.”
Bill replied, “With all this—you’re not using the term depression—but that’s definitely a feature of what you’re experiencing right now.”
Bill offered a few closing thoughts, and we set a time to meet the following week. I left the office feeling no less emotional than before. But at least I was talking to someone. I went home and had lunch with my family.
Until that October morning, I hadn’t considered the label depression in reference to my problems. One reason was because of my working definition of the term. Another was my reluctance to see my own situation as fitting the bill.
Many people speak of depression the same way they talk about a disease like diabetes or lupus (or even cancer), only in reference to the brain. We call it mental illness, emphasis on the illness. Its onset can be sudden, seemingly coming out of nowhere. Its causes are primarily biological. As one popular pharmaceutical commercial described it, depression is brain disorder reflecting an imbalance in one’s neurochemistry (this is where the term chemical imbalance originates).1
As embodied people, to say depression is physiological or biological makes a lot of sense. We never merely feel emotions in the abstract. We experience them in the whole of our being. Depressed feelings can be so unsettling that we often wonder what has gone wrong in our bodies to produce such discomfort. We feel the sorrow, deadness, or emptiness on a physiological level. It’s a natural for us to say that our bodies (or our brains) are on the fritz. It’s no surprise that many people have been prescribed medication to aid in alleviating the outward symptoms of depression. Like many other problems, when something is off, we often look to medicine for help.
I believe there are physiological dimensions to a person’s experience with depression. It also seems clear to me that other factors are also at play: environmental, relational, and even spiritual. Our culture, however, struggles with this kind of nuance. It has painted depression largely with one brush. It has reduced it to an easily digestible metaphor: depression is a disease.
In contrast to the disease model of depression, my understanding was largely shaped by those within my stream of Christian thought and practice. These voices acknowledged the physical realities that accompany depression. But they viewed its causes (no matter the initiating event) as primarily spiritual.
The spiritual view of depression goes something like this. The depressed person is confronted with some challenge or difficulty in their life. It could be one event (a diagnosis, a job loss, the death of a loved one), or it could be a pattern (financial strain, relational difficulty, family problems). Whatever the “cause”, the controlling influence of sin causes a person to wrongly respond to the initial problem. This response could be as varied as the causes. Characteristic examples include efforts to numb the feelings associated with that original, initiating event. But it could also look like attempts to control one’s situation to eliminate or correct the difficulty they are facing.
But these efforts, if they are effective, work only temporarily. Eventually depressive feelings return. It is here that the problem is often compounded. At this stage a person usually resorts to similar patterns of behavior that are meant to alleviate their discomfort once more, but to diminishing returns. There is a kind of downward spiral to the process. As the person swims vainly against the current of their destructive choices, their situation becomes all the more bleak. The result is a mix of hopelessness, resentment, and regret.
From my perspective, it was one explanation or the other. Depression was either a physical disease, or a spiritual problem.
There were elements in my situation that reflected both the physical and spiritual realities discussed above. But neither captured the essence of what I was feeling on a day to day basis. They felt too constrained, too simplistic, and too determinative.
My depression didn’t come out of nowhere. It had built over time. There were clear circumstantial realities that previously existed (and in some cases, had existed for years). These all informed the slow descent I was experiencing. It didn’t feel like a disease.
And while there were clearly spiritual dimensions to my struggles, it didn’t feel accurate to explain them by pointing to personal sin. Yes, there were failures in my life. But if it was failure (or a series of failures) that led to what I was experiencing, what would that say about God’s response to human weakness? Was he waiting for another misstep in my life so that the other shoe could drop? This ran counter to the message in the Bible I claimed to believe about God.2
There had to be other reasons. And looking back on the last several years, I can see two clear factors that I believe also informed my experiences.
The first was the impact of trauma.
By trauma, I am mostly describing the persistent consciousness of catastrophic suffering on one’s life. Trauma is what happens when the memory of a horrific event repeatedly (and at times, uncontrollably) intrudes upon the present. This intrusion impacts one’s thinking, feeling, and doing. It can happen when the memory surfaces from within. It can also happen when one is confronted with external, sensory reminders of their pain.
I was no stranger to sitting with people who had experienced traumatic suffering. I remember several years ago hearing the story of Arnie3, an Army veteran who had served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Arnie had been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a way to anticipate the potential triggering of loud music in our worship services, he sat in the back of our main sanctuary in an aisle seat. For Arnie, the possibility of traumatic intrusion shaped his interaction in social and community environments, no matter how unlikely the perceived threat.
Joshua was another member of our church who had also served in the military, in Afghanistan. When I first sat with him, it was for an unrelated problem. I actually didn’t know he was veteran until he told me. When I asked him how that part of his life impacted him, his countenance dropped and his eyes became wet with tears. He began to recount his time serving as a combat gunner. He was overcome with guilt because of his role in the killing of enemy combatants. The only way he had found relief to that point was to take walks. Long walks. He would walk miles all across the city, reciting psalms he had memorized that spoke of God’s kindness toward sinners.
Brandy was a young woman who attended our church with her friend, Robin. They both had come from addiction backgrounds. Each found freedom and sobriety through faith in Jesus Christ. One day Brandy was sitting in our sanctuary before worship. During our typical time to greet others at the beginning of the service, she turned around and met the eyes of a man she hadn’t seen since she was a small girl. It was the man who had molested her while he was dating her mother. He was visiting with a friend. He was unaware of Brandy’s presence, and believed that what happened seventeen years earlier would never be known. In her shock, Brandy ran out of the room. Robin followed closely behind. Outside, she learned what upset Brandy so much.4
And not to compare others’ suffering with my own, but I also had faced significant loss in my life. When I was twenty, Aimee’s dad died suddenly. When we were twenty-eight, we suffered two miscarriages in four months. This came after being told six months earlier that we would likely not be able to have children at all. Just after our tenth wedding anniversary, Aimee’s mom was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time.
In ministry, people I knew and loved died. They lost loved ones. There were divorces, and people who experienced abuse. And then there those whose lives imploded by their own hand. Even if indirect, the suffering of others landed on me. I carried all of those experiences. I knew what was possible.
Aimee’s cancer, however, was the first time that suffering was also accompanied by the enduring, unbearable emotional consciousness of what was happening. It was the first time the horror of our situation encroached on my daily life.
The most noticeable places where I felt this intrusion were, strangely, those that had typically brought peace. Sundays at church, long a place of connection, became largely intolerable. People loved us. They meant well. They sent us meals, money, and gifts. They took care of our children. They prayed for us. But they also asked me how Aimee was doing. Dozens of times. Every Sunday. All day long. For months on end.
Most times this was a sincere attempt to show care. But sometimes it was an effort to soothe the sudden internal discomfort prompted by another person’s suffering. After all, people have lives to live. They don’t think about me when I’m not around. Neither do I think of most people when they are elsewhere. When they see me, they remember, and they reach for the only thing that seems appropriate to say or ask. More often than not this was related to Aimee’s cancer. Sometimes this spark of recognition would happen mid-conversation. The person’s eyes would soften. Their head would tilt. They would say, softly, “Hey, how’s your wife doing?” There was nothing else I could do in those moments except to respond with kindness.
These folks weren’t wrong to ask me how my wife was doing. Quite the contrary. I’m thankful that others care. But imagine the irony. Almost every waking moment of my life was consumed by thoughts related to Aimee’s illness. I didn’t need the reminder. But for others (apart from our closest friends), their lives went on. Maybe we were part of their prayer list. Perhaps they had heard of our situation or read an update that I posted on CaringBridge. But they also had other things to do. And that’s okay.
Then, on Sunday, they would see me and they remember. And they did what they thought they should. They asked how she was doing. And I answered. Every. Time.
The effect compounded over time. Each question, especially when it was joined to that awkward remembrance, was a reminder:
Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has cancer. Your wife has CANCERCANCERCANCERCANCERCANCERCANCERCANCERRRRRRRRR.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I don’t think I would change how people approached us (except for those who absent-mindedly tried to cover their forgetfulness of our situation). But I still wanted to hide. And most Sundays, I figured out how to, or at least to be present in a way that could minimize the number of interactions like this I would have. I just wanted to keep the intrusion at bay to the extent I could.
Eventually, this feeling began to fade. But the encroachment hasn’t completely ended. Recently I was at a lunch with several colleagues. The conversation turned to summer vacations. Someone mentioned a hotel Aimee and I had stayed at last summer. I shared about our weekend there. It was a luxury hotel in Fort Worth. She had gone through three or four rounds of chemo. By that point, she had conspicuously begun losing her hair. On the day of check-in Aimee met with her stylist to shave her head. We then retreated to another city, where no one would know us.
Mentioning that weekend sent a pang of emotion down my body. I suddenly remembered it all again, like it was new. Aimee had cancer. She lost her hair. Her body was destroyed by chemo. Her breasts were amputated. Our lives are different now. This isn’t how I thought my life would go. Nothing will ever be the same. This isn’t fair. I hate this. Why did you do this God?
Some of you will read what I just wrote and think, Trauma is why he was depressed. Full stop.
I mean, yeah. Totally. Obviously. How could it not be the biggest factor?
But I don’t think it was the only reason. I don’t know if it was even the foundational reason. As I have reflected on the last year, I see trauma as the catalyst. It was something that landed on an existing landscape. It stripped away what was visible to reveal the roots underneath.
And what it uncovered wasn’t pretty. I refer to this discovery as the exposure of my overall pattern of life. It was this pattern that was the second, and most enduring influence on my depression.
Earlier in this article I mentioned how, in my first session with Bill, I discussed the observable decline in my capacity for work. Before cancer, I possessed an unusual ability for output. In a given week, it was common for me to meet with several church members for pastoral care or counseling, to teach an evening equipping class (sometimes two classes), to write an blog article or theological position paper, to study for a sermon, to chip away at a long-term curriculum project, to attend a 6am church elders meeting, to meet with the staff members I supervised, and to participate in the litany of staff-related duties required for a large church.
On top of that were Sundays, with multiple services, more pastoral meetings (sometimes an additional three to four), and if I was preaching, the delivery of a sermon three times to a total of 1,500 adults. If that wasn’t enough, a few years ago I decided to meet part-time with clients at a local Christian counseling center. Shortly after I was invited to coach and supervise doctoral students at a nearby seminary.
By the spring of 2023, it was normal for me to experience the work week described above while also meeting with upwards of nine counseling clients on Fridays in an uninterrupted span from 8am to 5pm. I remember some weeks sitting continuously in session all day, not eating, having a few water or bathroom breaks, straining to provide the necessary attentiveness my clients deserved.
After finishing my session notes, I would manage to drive home, say hello to my family, and slowly fade into the cushions of our pink, microfiber sectional sofa. After a dreamless night, I would wake on Saturdays and take my sons to soccer, or baseball, dreading the thought that Sunday would initiate this cycle anew the following day.
It was, in a word, unsustainable. It was unsustainable apart from any additional burdens in my life that may arise. There was no way to keep it up. But I tried.
So why did I do it? Why continue at such an egregious pace, irrespective of its impact on me or my family?
One reason was practical. We needed the money. Aimee had left her job as a hospital nurse the year before to spend more time with our children. We had a mortgage. We had a car payment. We were paying school tuition. We were giving to our church and to missionaries. We had taken on consumer debt. Like so many others, we were barely afloat financially. But we were trying hard. Taking on extra work, whether counseling or academic supervision, was a way I could serve my family. I did this naturally, joyfully even, without thought to its longterm effects. My family needed me, and I had the means to help. So I did it. But I couldn’t see how depleted I was becoming in the process.
Another reason was comparative. In my church-related world (though it is not limited to this arena), there is an unspoken badge of honor that comes through one’s busyness. I have friends in ministry and the counseling spheres who do even more than I was doing. Some of them are in the midst of finishing PhD’s, or writing books, or doing real estate on the side, or speaking at conferences, or recording weekly podcasts, or filming curriculum for Christian publishers, or pastoring churches of hundreds or thousands of people, or leading teams of dozens of staff members, or meeting with forty clients a week, all with families and children and houses and obligations like everyone else.
I wasn’t alone in what I was doing. But I became convinced that it was normal, necessary even, if I was to be seen as successful or effective in my work. I don’t believe this anymore.
But a third reason was personal. Deep down, I took pride in the work I was doing. I had three jobs. I spoke to thousands of people on a regular basis. I was writing for national organizations in my field. I was growing in influence. I was becoming something. I gloried in it. I loved it. I fed off the energy of my output. And it sustained me, to a point. But I was blind to the damage it was doing to my soul.
Eventually, I was like a lightbulb that buzzed and flickered before finally giving out. I became a shadow. I was unhappy, and I was so tired. My children began to complain, “Dad, you always work. Why can’t you stay home with us?” I wanted that—to be with them—but it felt far away. I had dreams of what could be. But how could those dreams be cultivated if all that waited for me was more? Was it worth it? To work like this, to keep up this pace, at such a cost to myself? To my family? I carried a lot of regret—for where we had been, but also what might be if this was what our life looked like in the future.
Something needed to change. Drastically if necessary. So we made a couple of decisions. In March of last year we put our house on the market. The sale and its proceed would remedy our financial burdens. After closing, we moved into a two-bedroom apartment in East Dallas. Our plan was to regroup and plan for what was next. We told our kids as we set up their new twin beds in their room three-in-a-row that it was a family adventure.
And in April I let my clients know that I would be stepping away from my counseling practice that coming June to devote more time to my family. It looked like things were finally going to slow down. The rest I was so desperate for was coming.
But on May 16, Aimee found a lump on her left breast. On May 17. she visited her primary care provider, a nurse practitioner named Jenn. Out of concern for the symptoms Aimee reported, Jenn ordered scans and a biopsy, which were performed that day.
On May 18, Aimee and I dropped our kids off at a birthday party. Not long after we drove away, her phone rang.
I listened intently to her interaction with the voice on the other line, and watched her scribble something on a scrap piece of paper in her hybrid cursive handwriting: Grade 3 Invasive Ductal Carcinoma.
Ok, let me take a deep breath real quick. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Rest.
There, that’s better.
I don’t know what your experiences with depression have been. You may read the above and see something familiar in your life, “Yep, I’ve been there. It was just like that”. Or you may think, “That sounds like a lot. It’s kind of bumming me out, tbh.” Or perhaps, “Yeah, that’s tough. But honestly, I’ve been through the same things and I think I turned out fine.” Or, “Oh man, how hard. But where is God in all of this?”
Everyone will have different stories. Sometimes, suffering leads to depression. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, a person trends in that direction even when their life is going well. Some people endure pain with a resilience that is admirable, even if it is a touch unrealistic for most of us. There isn’t really a set criteria for why it happens, or why it doesn’t.
What I hope you see however, is that there is always complexity. When someone is depressed, there are always reasons. Those reasons have their own internal logic in how they inform someone’s experience with depression. For me, those reasons boiled down to two clear truths:
My wife had cancer.
My lifestyle was unsustainable.
One had to do with the impact of traumatic suffering. The other had to do with my choices. Both circumstances cohered into something unique that landed with the force of a nuclear blast on my life.
When a person finds themself in a situation like mine, there are three choices. The first is to do nothing. To live with the pain; to ignore it; to adapt to it. I did this for a long time. It left me in a predictable place. I was angry, hopeless, and full of regret.
The second is to address the symptoms. There is nothing wrong with this. Maybe it’s medication. Maybe it’s diet and exercise. It probably involves addressing sleep habits, alcohol consumption, social media engagement, and any other of the many observable factors that impact our day-to-day life and one’s experience with depression.
This is the realm that Christians refer to as common grace. It includes those interventions that are available to everyone, and are beneficial to everyone. Addressing symptoms is a way to alleviate suffering. When a person feels better, they usually have a better sense of what is happening in their life. They can carry out their day to day responsibilities: work, family, relationships, etc. This is an important part of addressing the experience of depression. Otherwise a person may often find themselves fighting against a wall of noise that keeps them from hearing anything else. It is a good thing to see relief come into a person’s life. We should pursue this, and encourage it for others.
Many people will stop after this second choice. I can understand why. If a person feels better, they may come to think that they are better. No further action is necessary, and he or she can go on living their life.
But there is a risk here. If a person addresses only the symptoms of depression, then what about the things underneath—the trauma, the grief, the loss, the pain, the lifestyle choices—that prompted all of this in the first place?
It is this question that must push us to the third choice. This choice is to address symptoms while also looking at the big questions of life that depression (and truthfully, any form of suffering) forces upon us. It is the choice to grapple with the very heart of what a person believes about their world. If we refuse this choice, the most we can hope for is surface-level improvement.
Everyone has beliefs, whether they think of themselves as spiritual, religious, or irreligious. We all have a basic sense of the way we think things should go, the way people should live, who God is (or who he isn’t), and if he exists, what role he has in our mediating our pain.
When we suffer, those beliefs are revealed. They come out in the inner monologue of our souls, when we think to ourselves, “Why is this so hard?” They are expressed in our conversations with others, “I just can’t understand why this is happening.” If we pray, they often show up here as well (Please Lord, I just want this to stop). This is often what we see in the Bible through the various laments included in the Psalter. God, how long will I suffer? Where are you, Lord? You feel so far away from me.
Because humans are dynamic creatures, these beliefs are not simply static representations of the position a person holds regarding a given topic or question. Rather, our beliefs establish the existential foundation for one’s interpretive response to his or her world. They form the framework that shapes why and how we think about what happens in our lives.
From a Christian perspective, every person (regardless of their spiritual orientation) possesses some degree of right belief about the world. This is because the Bible describes people as being made in God’s image. As image-bearers (which is a metaphorical way of describing the dignity, distinction, and purpose instilled in every human life), we mirror our Creator in forming judgments about what happens in the world. This is why we usually rejoice at occasions of great gladness and joy. And it is why we desire justice when wrongdoing occurs in our lives, or communities, or in other parts of the world.
But people are also flawed. For as often as we think rightly about our lives, we also exhibit beliefs that are distorted or just plain untrue. This of course is a biblical theme as well. We don’t see ourselves clearly. Our hearts are often deceitful, and deceived. As God said through the prophet Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it?”5 If we are to have any hope for a remedy, we need the forgiving and transforming grace of God. Christians believe it is only by this means—made possible by the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and applied by the Holy Spirit—that a person can go from broken to truly healed.
Change like this, from a biblical point of view, is always a work in progress. We aren’t there yet. Christians believe that the transformation God brings is only partial in this life. A person who loves God, having put their trust in Christ, is gradually being changed for the better, morally and spiritually. This is what Christians mean when they describe a person as “becoming more like Christ”. But they aren’t perfect yet. They still sin and they can still fail.
What this means on a practical level is that it’s possible for someone to have right and wrong beliefs in day to day life. But how do we know whether this is happening? If we’re honest, people aren’t great when it comes to objective self-assessment. This is why we must measure these beliefs against some standard of truth. For Christians, that standard comes through one primary metric, stated here in the form of a question: Does this belief reflect the truth about God, about myself, and about the world he created as it is appears in the Bible?
So what does all of this practical theology have to do with depression? Well, everything. Let me explain how.
As I’ve said, my depression, though informed by many things, was largely the product of two experiences: Aimee’s cancer, and an unsustainable, emotionally unhealthy lifestyle.
Through those experiences, a host of beliefs were exposed in my heart. Some of these were true, while others were clearly false. But some were in a weird gray zone: things that were in some sense “true”, but were applied in an imbalanced or inaccurate way to my heart.
Take my beliefs about anger, for example. I was so angry about everything that had happened to us. But I believed that most, if not all expressions of anger were wrong. This belief was shaped in one way by how I sought to handle anger historically in my life (don’t rock the boat, be agreeable, take things in stride). I learned pretty early on that suppressing anger was a useful strategy for maintaining equilibrium in my life.
But imagine what happens when those inherited beliefs show up in a person’s attempts to live according to biblical principles? Bible passages that talk about sinful anger became very important to me. I read them as a confirmation of my previously held notions about anger and how it should be expressed. Even though every person of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) expresses anger in the Bible, sometimes in significant and profoundly impactful ways, I had convinced myself that every expression of anger was sin, or had the potential to very quickly become sin. The best way to deal with it then, was to move away from it as fast as I could. To suppress it, to ignore it, to conceal it.
The result was an innate impulse to deny the reality of what was happening inside of me. You can imagine how that went when it was no longer possible to ignore what I was feeling. I would become a geyser of emotion, pouring out toxic anger on everyone and everything around me. When it came to anger (and by extension, any troubling emotion) I lived with two extremes. My anger was nothing, or it was all-consuming. Even though sinful anger is a real thing, the pattern that existed in my life was simply not what the Bible reveals about God and his anger, or about the godly, Jesus-like way for people to experience and express anger in their own lives.
It wasn’t until my wife was diagnosed with cancer, and I was months into a depressive episode, that these extremes were revealed as destructive forces to my soul. I had (and am having) to relearn what it means to acknowledge the emotional capacities God has given me. I have had to figure out how to tell God I’m angry, and how to allow my feelings to have their full weight in my heart. I’ve had to learn to constructively express anger in relationships by saying things that I previously felt unable to say. To do all this, I have had to confront the underlying belief that led me away from this truth in the first place. I had to consider what emotional expression looked like in the life of Jesus. He became angry, he said hard things, he expressed his heart before the Father, and he did it all with righteousness. It was possible, necessary even, for me to imitate him in this.
I also needed to change how I understood God’s most fundamental disposition towards me. For a host of reasons, until Aimee’s cancer, I basically believed that yes, God loves me, but that his love (or at least his situational approval of me) was contingent upon how “well” I handled my life. But who defines what “well” looks like? I mean, I did of course. And for me, to handle something well meant to stay calm, be productive, have a good reputation, and make other people think you are wise, godly, and humble.
Let’s think about how that set of beliefs might inform the way a person would structure their life. It just might, maybe, lead them to say yes to every vocational opportunity thrown their way. It might prompt them to compare themselves against others who struggle with the same internal belief that more is always better, and to ignore any concept of limitation as somehow not in the interest of God’s best for my life. The reward for all this striving is approval, acceptance, and honor. To not attain those things is to miss out on God’s blessing. To fail in any way (no matter how minor) is to live in a perpetual cycle of shame.
It’s not too surprising to see how someone with this understanding might look at a crisis like cancer and secretly wonder, What did I do to deserve all this? And for that question to ultimately reflect a belief about God that could be summed up with the following: God loves people yes, but he is pretty upset with them about their failures. They should probably expect bad things to happen in the future instead of joy and gladness.
I would have never said this was what I believed. But if you looked at my actions closely, and if you had access to the deep thoughts of my heart, you probably would come to a different conclusion.
It wasn’t until I was confronted with my impaired capacity and complete listlessness that I was forced to acknowledge how false my beliefs about God’s heart toward me actually were. My failures and my limitations weren’t barriers to God’s love. They were actually the means by which his love was most deeply known.
This truth came into my life through Scripture, but it largely was exemplified by Aimee and by my friends. These were people in my life who patiently and thoughtfully displayed compassion, mercy, and help. People like Adam who listened to me unpack all the tangled thoughts that were circling in my mind last fall and validated what I had felt. People like Ben who prayed for me often and sat with me all day in the hospital during Aimee’s first surgery (Adam was there too. Thanks guys). People like Paul and Erin who would, and continue to, make room in their home and life for me and Aimee to just be us and have no expectation that things will be neat and tidy in our hearts. People like Emily who came over to hang out and laugh and help take care of our children. People like Steven and Heather who would say that they loved me and would show up at a moment’s notice. There’s a lot more people out there who did things like this. But God used these folks in a particular way to reinforce that not only did he love me, but that he wanted to care for my heart as well. Even when I couldn’t do anything to reciprocate or return the favor.
And wouldn’t you know it, it’s been those relationships that have also softened the pain I’ve felt when others have tried to show care to me and to Aimee in clunky or absent-minded ways. I’ve seen the same kindness that motivates these people because I’ve been the recipient of kindness from those closest to me. I can go to church (most weeks) without feeling overwhelmed. I can think about my experiences without crumbling internally, even it often still makes me really sad or angry. I can feel, strongly feel even, without the first thing I think about being, Oops. Am I doing something wrong? I am experiencing more and more what I think the Apostle Paul tried to capture when he wrote to his protégé Timothy: “I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.”6
It has taken depression for me to reconsider all of these things. And to be clear, this is a work that is still very much in process. Some days I feel just like I did last fall. But a lot has changed.
God has used my depression to show me a more truthful way to live.
God is showing me that it’s ok to feel. Scratch that. It is necessary to feel. To feel everything, good and bad.
God is showing me that he is kind, and that his love is mine, before and independent of (and despite) anything I might bring to the table.
And God is showing me that it’s ok (needed even) to slow down and order my life differently. This has brought even more structural changes to our lives, but they have all been in the interest of a quieter, more peaceful life, even if it means less public acclaim, less financial security, and less influence.
In other words, God is doing what he has always done. He is taking human brokenness, failure, and unbelief, and he is turning those things into a means of displaying his purposes, love, kindness, and grace. He is taking the ashes of the last few years of my life and turning them into something just a little more beautiful. I don’t mean to sound like this is all over. It’s not. But at least I can see a little more of what good is coming from it.
This famous commercial for Zoloft, an early SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor) medication, popularized use of the term “chemical imbalance”, which is the the way many describe the underlying causes of depression.
A message which could perhaps be summed up with one statement from Psalm 103:10, “He does not treat us according to what our sins deserve.”
The following names have been altered to protect the identities of those mentioned.
This encounter, shocking as it was, was actually the beginning of justice for Brandy against her abuser. She ultimately chose to file a police report, which led to an investigation and an indictment. Eventually the man she saw that day was convicted and incarcerated for his crimes against her.
See Jeremiah 17:9.
See 1 Timothy 1:14.
This is so good! Thanks so much for sharing.