On the other side of darkness

It's been ages. And I've said this to myself before: why keep a blog if I'm not really going to keep it? Just a few days ago, a close friend suggested that perhaps updating my blog would be a worthwhile idea. It's been over three months since I've posted here. The reason for this is that I honestly have had neither the time, the energy, nor the inclination. You see, only now with Spring finally arriving in all its new-life glory is my family emerging from the other side of the darkness of depression. Not long after my last post--dated January 21st--my wife entered into a black season, three months of soul-rending, that only with the emergence of longer days and more frequent blue skies has begun to dissipate. Needless to say, our family was stuck in a veritable black hole for the bulk of the winter, a depression heavier than twelve inches of hard-packed snow. And our climb out of this hole has been long, arduous, and frought with feelings of despair and frustration, doubt and even anger. Yet at the same time, and I will get to this at greater length later, God has seen us through, even if we weren't always able to see that so clearly. Our view of heaven obscured, we clung desperately sometimes to our faith as best as we were able.

Depression--and I mean of the clinical, serious sort--is a thief. It steals your joy, takes your peace, and robs you of life itself. Your own mind becomes your worst enemy as it is flooded with negative thoughts to the extreme. There were times when all my wife wanted was for it to end. There were times when all we could do was cling to one another, sob, and cry out to God a heart-wrenching, "WHY??" There were times when everything felt lost except for the barest instinct to survive.

Depression also colours the remainder of your experience. When you're facing depression, nothing is like it was. Life is tainted. Hope is absent. Even the joy of family is taken away; there were weeks during this time when our little girl had to stay with her grandparents because she wanted her Mummy and Mummy wasn't well enough to look after her. When your own child begins to show obvious signs of stress, you know it's become serious. One evening in particular was absolutely horrible--possibly one of the more difficult moments in all the three months--when we had to call for Ella's grandparents to come get her. She had been with us for just over a day and already was displaying indications of stress because of Alisha's depression. Suffice it to say, Ella was not herself. Alisha's Mum, brother, and sister-in-law arrived and once Ella realized that she would be going with them and not staying with us, the look on her face said it all. It was the face of a little two-year old trying to process the situation and feeling the weight of the moment. It was heart-breaking. When she left, Alisha and I wept. What was happening to our family?

For the first month and a half, this was something, amazingly, that we hid from some. But once we realized that this was not going away quickly, we knew that we had to tell more of our family and friends. Alisha wrote a long e-mail to close friends disclosing what was happening. Around the same time I revealed it to our church. This was becoming ever more important since Alisha and Ella rarely were at church; we didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea! And we also realized our deep need to open ourselves up to the available prayer support of our church family. Initially, because we know that depression can be so hard to understand, we chose not to tell people outside of our closest friends and family. I think we feared misunderstanding. But the stress was affecting more than Ella. I was spending much of my time at home caring for Alisha, and was feeling the pressure of not getting work done at the church. Telling our church family was the only way of alleviating that pressure. And, thank the Lord, our church exhibited the graciousness of God, who, in his mercy, accepts us in our brokenness and by doing so helps us inch our way toward resurrection life and newness.

Throughout this particular trial, we questioned, prayed, doubted, cried, but never cursed God. Our circumstances were Job-like, at least in proportion to what we would no doubt be able to endure. And God was there. We didn't always hear him or see him. Yet he was there. He was there in the availability of family to help, especially when it came to taking care of Ella. He was there in the e-mail responses and phone calls of close friends who came alongside us with the wisdom of Job's friends before they began to talk. He was with us in the prayers of our church family who were vigilant and persistent in their knocking on heaven's door. And he was with us even in the smallest details of home life, for despite the enormity of this depression and its seeming endlessness, the one thing we never did was curse him and each other. There were moments of tension, yes. But love reigned. Perhaps not always in our attitudes, but in our actions. Love was made flesh and dwelt among us, with us, and for us.

Bruce Cockburn sings in "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" that "you've got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight," and there's truth in those words. Love is called to bear with the harshest, most unfriendly, most uncongenial of circumstances until signs of life begin to appear. In Genesis, God speaks light into the darkness--"Let there be light!" Only God can bring the daylight we need--and he did, oh, did he ever! It was the second last week of April, and finally there was blue sky, and the warmth of the sun was something we could feel rather than have to imagine. It was then that Alisha's depression noticeably lifted--and, in fact, she got a sunburn from being out so long doing yardwork!

With previous episodes of depression, we tended to move on quickly and in some respects to forget about it and put it out of our minds. “Life is good now,” we would think to ourselves, “so let's not even dwell for one second on that awful time.” Understandable. But I don't want to forget. Not entirely. I guess I want our experience to have a purpose that's larger, a purpose I can see. You might say that I want some evidence of Paul's words that "all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose." Whether I am granted this prayer remains to be seen, but in the meantime I am glad and grateful that while we do experience darkness in our lifetimes that "God is light and in him there is no darkness at all."