LIVING WITH FAITH AND DEPRESSION
J.I. Packer in Praying the Lord’s Prayer, which is an excerpt from Growing in Christ.
“When I say, ‘hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come,’ I should be adding in my mind the words, ‘in and through me,’ and so giving myself to God afresh to be, so far as I can be, the means of answering my own prayer.”
From A Grief Observed:
“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
From The Power and The Glory, boy, does tribalistic, political America and the church and myself need this.
Greene:
“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it.
When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate.
Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
I like what Tim Keller says here — in essence, that Christ’s suffering proves that your suffering has nothing to do with God’s love for you.
After all, God loved his Son more than anything, and yet his Son still suffered.
So when you’re tempted to think that your suffering proves God doesn’t love you, remember two things: a) that Jesus suffered more than any human who has ever lived and b) that the Father, according to Jesus, loves you just as much as he does Jesus.
In that vein, he quotes a beautiful song by Edward Shillito called “Jesus of the Scars” which finishes thusly:
“The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”
By the way, the playwright Thornton Wilder said it beautifully: “In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve.”
Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel.
“The danger with our good works, spiritual investments, and all the rest of it is that we can construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our self-worth. Complacency then replaces sheer delight in God’s unconditional love.
….. Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games, or pop psychology.
It is an act of faith in the God of grace.”
Frederick Buechner, in his sermon “The Great Dance” takes a stab at one of the many ways people distinguish the two.
“Happiness comes when things are going our way, which makes it only a forerunner to the unhappiness that inevitably follows when things stop going our way, as in the end they will stop for all of us.
Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening.”
Amen. But I think most of us, myself included, unconsciously pick happiness seven days a week — including Sunday.
That’s because we’re, from birth, so wed to “things going our way” that it’s a supernatural act of grace for us to look at life through a different lens. To be okay when things don’t go our way. Which we try for, but which we mostly fail at (or at least I do).
Frederick Buechner, in A Crazy, Holy Grace.
“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”
Quite the study.
Australian researchers took a look at stool samples of children at one month, 6 months, and 12 months old, and then measured their anxiety-like behaviors at 2 years old.
They found that infants with a low level of the gut bacteria, Prevotella, were much more likely to exhibit anxiety-like behaviors such as shyness, sadness, and internal focus.
That, in turn, may lead to greater likelihood of childhood and adult anxiety.
Low levels of Prevotella are also a risk factor for things like autism and Parkinson’s Disease, and low levels are much more common in western societies.
So what should you do? Feed your kids a varied diet and don’t overdo the antibiotics, if possible, because they lower levels of Prevotella.
Beyond the practical implications, there are so many spiritual implications for the church.
So often, we’ve been taught that anxiety is a spiritual issue (lack of trust etc) when study after study is, over and over, showing it’s a medical condition. One that often begins very early. Over simple things like gut bacteria.
How many parents see their anxious two year old or toddler (and yes, they definitely can show abnormal anxiety at that age) and say, “Hey, that little fellow definitely doesn’t have enough gut bacteria.”
None of us says that, but that’s a really plausible explanation.
Same situation for adults. How many times do we insist on a spiritual explanation when it’s often just a matter of gut bacteria?
We need to change how we talk about every one of these mental health conditions and, instead of automatically ascribing a spiritual cause, recognize that these are medical conditions.
That doesn’t mean spirituality can’t speak to it. After all, our Christianity has everything to say about how we approach cancer, mentally, but not too much physically.
There’s tons of evidence suggesting yoga fights depression, anxiety, and even PTSD.
There are a number of reasons why — breathing and posture seem to be a part of modulating the stress response, and now researchers have unearthed another reason.
Yoga increases activity of an incredibly important neurotransmitter amino acid you may have heard of — gamma aminobutyric acid. More commonly, known as GABA.
What’s so fascinating about this?
Benzodiazepines, which you probably know are pretty powerful at fighting anxiety, work by acting on, you guessed it, GABA receptors.
Basically, the more GABA, the less anxiety.
Now, according to the study, yoga is another way to affect your GABA levels, and here’s the pretty cool thing: The lead researcher of the new study, Chris Streeter from the Boston School of Medicine, says just one yoga session per week can affect your GABA levels for the entire week.
After 8 days though, GABA levels start to fall again, so it’s important to get that one session per week.
Here’s the science behind how yoga affected brains — as measured by MRI’s and MRS various stages.
“The region of interest was the left thalamus. This area is functionally connected to brain regions associated with mood regulation.
GABA levels rise and fall with progesterone levels. Progesterone is metabolized to allopregnanolone, which directly binds at GABAA receptors and modulates the function of the GABA system. Allopregnanolone has anxiolytic and antidepressant effects.”
From Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen (one of my favorite books).
“Without trust, I cannot let myself be found. Trust is that deep inner conviction that the Father wants me home.
As long as I doubt that I am worth finding and put myself down as less loved than my younger brothers and sisters, I cannot be found.
I have to keep saying to myself, ‘God is looking for you. He will go anywhere to find you.
He loves you, he wants you home.
There is a very strong, dark voice in me that says the opposite: ‘God isn’t really interested in me.’
By telling myself that I am not important enough to be found, I amplify my self-complaint until I have become totally deaf to the voice calling for me. At some point, I must totally disown my self-rejecting voice and claim the truth that God does indeed want to embrace me.”