One of the hardest experiences for a Christian is navigating one’s way through the (normally) once-in-a-long-while episodes when the wheels of your life come flying off and you find it difficult to simply get through the day. It might be losing a job, a failing relationship, a health crisis, or any number of other difficult circumstances.
I faced one of those episodes half-way through my college years. My first girlfriend had just dumped me and I totally fell apart. I couldn’t focus on school, I didn’t want to get out of bed, I started losing weight; my get up and go just got up and left. The second worst part was experiencing an emotional pain far more excruciating than I had ever felt before; the hurt was as real as a knife cutting into me. I soon became so depressed that my roommate, Jeff, took my razor blade away from me and wouldn’t give it back. He was really concerned about me.
But the very worst part was the guilt I felt before God for feeling so bad. I was familiar with the Scriptures that suggest, rather, command us to embrace the joy to be had when our lives are falling apart. Verses such as “consider it all joy when you encounter various trials,” and “rejoice and be glad . . . when people insult you and persecute you . . ., for great is your reward in heaven,” kept flooding my mind, accusing and condemning me for my grave spiritual failure to not keep God’s perfect Word to us. Those weeks and months were nearly unbearable as I careened back and forth between seeking God’s forgiveness for my disobedience and lack of faith, only to carry a greater burden of guilt every next day as I failed all over again.
Yet, looking back after much time had passed, it became more and more obvious to me that our loving Heavenly Father was working in my life to impart to me some valuable spiritual insight. Somewhere in the midst of those horrible months I was directed to two lesser-known Bible passages that I had never read or heard before. The first one was Ps. 6:1-3. “O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger, nor chasten me in Your wrath. Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am pining away. Heal me, O Lord, for my bones are dismayed, and my soul is greatly dismayed. But You, O Lord – how long?”
This passage hit me like a ton of bricks. Here we see one of the great heroes of our faith, the man who possessed “a heart after God,” struggling with the same thoughts and emotions I had been dealing with for months. He continues, “I am weary with my sighing; every night I make my bed swim (emphasis added) , I dissolve my couch with my tears.” That pretty much summed up my experience. How did David know what I would be going through so many years ago?
Now a whole new set of perplexing thoughts came pouring in: David’s questions about God being angry with him, his emotional anguish, the sense that God was slow to respond, a growing despair that was gnawing at his soul. How could a spiritual giant such as King David find himself in such a state? As I wrestled with these meditations over many days, a ray of sunlight began to creep into my mind and heart. Could it possibly be that there is room in the Christian life for occasional periods of depression, short journeys through the “shadow of the valley of death,” some rounds of hand-to-hand combat with certain realities that are built into the very nature of living in a fallen world?
This small sliver of light was intensified greatly when I “discovered” the second scripture that for the first time opened up for me a way through to the other side of my depression and grief. “Sing praise to the Lord, you His godly ones, and give thanks to His holy name. For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for a lifetime; weeping may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:4-5). Also penned by David, it gives a larger perspective on those circumstances in life that threaten to do us in.
We do indeed live in a fallen world and are subject to a wide variety of painful, discouraging, and difficult circumstances. And in the midst of those difficult circumstances, what we see and feel most immediately is the danger, the sadness, the pain that comes naturally with such things. But the presence of these tough times in our lives, when we “make our beds swim,” do not change the rock-solid fact that our all loving, supremely powerful, and infinitely wise heavenly Father does indeed care for us (1 Pet. 5:7) and will indeed restore our joy if we cling to Him through the “night” into the “morning.”
I thereby recommitted myself to put all my hope and trust in the Lord to bring me through. Jeff happily returned my razor a few months later.