Severe depression does not feel like sadness. Sadness has motion in it — it moves toward something, processes something, arrives somewhere. Depression is the absence of motion. It is being in a room where the doors are sealed and the lights have gone out and there is no particular reason to believe the lights will come back.
I have been in that room twice. Once after my farm started failing. Once after I got off my medication too fast and my mind came apart in a way I could not fully track in real time.
The wilderness in scripture is not a metaphor for mild difficulty. Elijah sat under a broom tree and asked to die. The psalmists did not write about feeling a little off. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days and came back changed — not unchanged, not untouched, changed. Something happened there that was necessary.
I am not going to tell you the wilderness is a gift. I do not believe suffering is something God sends to teach us lessons. I believe God is present in suffering, which is different. Emmanuel — God with us — is not a promise that the room stays lit. It is a promise that you are not alone in the dark.
What I found in the room: people who stayed. My wife, who was dealing with her own health crisis and still came. My parents, who let me live in a camper in their backyard without making me explain it. Friends who kept texting when I did not respond. Jason, who called from a class he was teaching because he picked up the phone anyway.
Grace almost always arrives through people. That is not a theological footnote. That is the mechanism.
If you are in the wilderness right now — if the lights are out and the doors are sealed — I am not going to tell you to push through. I am going to tell you to receive. Which is harder than pushing. Receiving means letting someone sit with you in the dark. It means texting back. It means making the appointment you have been putting off.
Elijah sat under the broom tree and an angel touched him and said: arise and eat. Not: figure out what this is teaching you. Not: identify the spiritual discipline that will get you through this.
Arise and eat.
The way through is not around. But you do not go through alone.
This piece is adapted from a longer essay at Southern Legends.
Read the full essay →
Matt Headley
Founding pastor of Ecclesia Community. Ordained United Methodist. Flower farmer. Builder. I walk with a limp. That is why I can walk with you.
We discuss pieces like this in the Ecclesia community every Tuesday morning.