Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness

by Edward T. Welch

You would think that if your circumstances were better, you would be too. But depression has a logic of its own. Once it settles in, it can’t distinguish between a loving embrace, the death of a close friend, and the news that a neighbor’s grass is growing.

You are confident that everyone would be better off without you. Is it any wonder that suicidal thoughts are always close?

Just don’t assume that your depression will vanish upon confession and knowing God’s forgiveness.

depression should also be approached carefully. It might be pointing to important matters of the heart that are crying out for attention. Ignore them and they will just call back later. There are times when depression is saying something and we must listen.

You can be assured of this: God really does speak in our suffering, and we have good reason to believe that the words he says are good and powerful enough to lighten our pain.

Satan lies to us, he can afflict us physically, and he generally seeks to persuade us that allegiance to the true God is not in our best interests.

More recognizable, however, is how Satan might seek to influence us after we are depressed. Any prolonged suffering can become an occasion to question the goodness of God. As soon as that question comes, Satan sits down next to us and tries to confirm our suspicions.

God is over all things, and nothing happens apart from his knowledge and will. By the time suffering or depression comes to our doorstep, God did it. To believe anything else is to opt for a universe that is random and out of control, without a guiding hand bringing all things to a purposeful and awe-inspiring conclusion.

The reason Scripture doesn’t give clear guidelines for assigning responsibility is that it is not essential for us to know precise causes. This is good news: you don’t have to know the exact cause of suffering in order to find hope and comfort.

Instead of teaching us how to identify the causes of suffering, Scripture directs us to the God who knows all things and is fully trustworthy. In other words, Scripture doesn’t give us knowledge so that we will have intellectual mastery of certain events; it gives us knowledge so that we would

know and trust God. “God, I don’t know what you are doing, but you do, and that is enough.” Somehow, turning to God and trusting him with the mysteries of suffering is the answer to the problem of suffering.

all suffering is intended to train us to fix our eyes on the true God. Therefore, depression, regardless of the causes, is a time to answer the deepest and most important of all questions: Whom will I trust? Whom will I worship?

At its very roots, life is about God. Whether you shake your fist at him, consider him so distant that his existence is irrelevant, or tremble before him because you feel that you are under his judgment, the reality is this: the basic questions of life and the fundamental issues of the human heart are about God. Life is about knowing him or avoiding him. It is about spiritual allegiances. Whom will you trust in the midst of pain? Whom will you worship?

expect to find fallacies in your thinking about yourself and God. In other words, although you may think that you know all you need to know about God—or all you want to know—you don’t. When in doubt, let humility be the order of the day.

When the memory of such a costly sacrifice becomes distant, and life’s frustrations tempt us to doubt, all we need is a quick reminder. Our God says, “If I have sacrificed my Son for you, do you really think I am going to be stingy and withhold my love now?”

He commands his people not to covet because it is a form of denying his generosity. He is not trying to hold out on you until you are whipped into shape. Demons would have you believe such things. Instead, he says, “Open wide your mouth and I will fill it” (Ps. 81:10). He invites us to the most lavish of banquets, and all he requires is that we are hungry and bring nothing (Isa. 55:1–3).

Of the Puritan William Cowper it was said, “It is possible to be a child of God, without consciousness of the blessing, and to have title to a crown, and yet feel to be immured in the depths of a dungeon.”

Your decision is between calling out to the Lord or not. This is the choice that has confronted those in misery throughout history. Listen to the prophet Hosea, who wrote these words on behalf of the Lord: “They do not cry out to me from their hearts but wail upon their beds” (Hosea 7:14).1 You can sit in silence or cry to the Lord. You can cry on your bed or cry to the Lord. These are the two choices.

Begin a search. Start with words and phrases that reflect your experience. If that seems too much, ask someone to read selected psalms to you.

Jesus is the Divine Singer, and now the songs of the Son of God have been given as gifts to the children of God.

Hope, as you will find, is a skill that takes practice. There is no verse, pill, or possession that will make it magically appear. Reciting psalms that you have claimed as your own is part of that practice.

Don’t just speak the prayers so that your depression can lift. Speak them because they are true and because they are evidence of Christ at work in you. Speak them often.

Faith is not the presence of warm religious feeling. It’s the knowledge that you walk before the God who hears.

Do you believe that it is impossible for the Holy God to love you and even delight in you? If so, you are believing Satan’s lie that God loves you because of what you do. The truth is that he loves you because he is the God who loves, and the sacrifice of Jesus proves it. The cross of Christ expresses God’s delight in all who believe, and if you believe that Jesus is the risen Lord, he delights in and loves you.

With depression, assume the lie is present. Consider it a permanent attachment. As long as you struggle with depression, you will have to be particularly alert to it. Your goal isn’t to overcome it; your goal is to engage it with a growing knowledge of Jesus Christ.

When you have a growing knowledge of God, your natural response is humility. In the face of such a powerful spiritual response to the knowledge of Christ, Satan is powerless.

“In the worst of times, there is still more cause to complain of an evil heart than of an evil world.”

Too often we live on little scraps of meaning. It is amazing how we can survive on so little: a three-percent raise, a new pair of shoes, a one-night stand, an Internet relationship. We manage to eke out meaning and purpose from fumes. That is, of course, until you submerge into depression. Then you notice that there is no larger story, and the stage collapses.

Depression feels like a state of not-thinking, but it is also a place of insight because you see that the stage was really just a stage. What seemed meaningful and real a few years ago has turned out to be a façade. Pleasures were fleeting. Nothing lasted. Marriage became stale.

Depression says, “You will not find meaning in what you are doing,” and depression is right. What it doesn’t tell you is, “Keep looking, you will find it. You are a creature with a royal purpose.” For this, you need to listen to others who have gone this way before. They urge you to continue and point the way.

Fearing God and keeping his commandments brings a certain simplicity to life. He is the Creator; we are the creatures. We belong to him. When he directs us, we follow. We come before him and say, “And how do you want me to live today?” The psalmist goes so far as to say that his affliction was valuable because it taught him more about keeping God’s commandments, which was his delight (Ps. 119:71).

To glorify God means to have our lives make him obvious and beautiful. We want him to be famous. We want to draw attention to the glorious God who loved us, and we do that by trusting him and loving others.

What God’s law does is describe the character of the King so we can imitate him.

Do you want to see evidence of the Holy Spirit in your life? When you say, “Why bother?” answer, “Because of Jesus.”

Let’s say you just heard a testimony from someone who said she had been depressed until God completely delivered her. She is, of course, ecstatic. But could it be that she was putting her trust in being healed rather than in the God who loves, forgives, perseveres, and heals? Now consider another woman who has experienced deep depression. Her testimony is that she believes God is good, whether depression leaves or returns. She has learned to persevere in troubles and find contentment in God in the midst of them. That is a glorious testimony.

What you thought was a path of life now looks more like a battlefield. Satan’s strategy is to wear you down. You remember the cross one day, and Satan is content to wait for tomorrow. If he can’t outfight you (because God fights for you), he tries to outwait you. Perseverance is what you need in prolonged wars.

Martin Luther called depression anfechtungen, which means “to be fought at.” What a perfect name! Instead of being translated as “something to surrender to,” it is a call to arms.

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Ps. 42:5–6, 11)

God’s sovereign control over history and our own personal stories make past situations more important, not less. What happened to us was not a series of random, unrelated events.

What happens when people are raised on a steady diet of “You are great, you can do anything, you deserve it, you are the best, you can get what you want”? Sooner or later they find that they are not great, they can’t do everything, they are not the best, and they can’t control it all. Depression and denial are the only two options left.

“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”6

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was a longing ... For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.8

Mental pain usually needs an interpretive push to send it to the hell and hopelessness we call depression. All pain is interpreted pain.

Whoever we are and whatever we believe, we are all structured the same. We see our actions; more hidden are our thoughts and feelings. Beneath those are our imaginations and motivations—the apparent reasons for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. But deeper still is the knowledge of God and our response to him (fig. 13.2).

Part of the depressive syndrome is that you are immensely loyal to your interpretation of yourself and your world. If God says you are forgiven in Christ, you create new rules that mandate contrition, penance, and self-loathing. If God says he loves you, you insist it is impossible. There it is: your system is higher than God’s.

The heart of Scripture is that God has moved toward us and taken the initiative to forgive our sins. He doesn’t forgive because you are sad about your sin; he forgives because Jesus paid the penalty in full.

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

You don’t really know who you are until you have gone through suffering.

Joy is not the opposite of depression. It is deeper than depression. Therefore, you can experience both. Depression is the relentless rain. Joy is the rock. Whether depression is present or not, you can stand on joy.

trust in a person,