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Mercy for Depressed Moms:
How God Met Me in Crisis

as featured at Desiring God
full article
Jesus wasn’t the one insisting that I pull myself out of the pit. He was the one calling me to take refuge in him as he walked me through the dark.
Being admitted to the mental hospital didn’t feel like God’s mercy to me. It seemed more like a cruelty. I wanted to be “depression-free.” I thought that was a God-honoring goal to strive toward. With a household to run and a family to care for, there seemed no time to be downcast. I was tired of being sidelined by sadness. But I was worn by conflicts and child-rearing challenges. Though I had tried so hard for so long to “keep calm and carry on,” the continual striving to be emotionally stable seemed futile. I would feel “fine” only for a time. Then I would crash.

Perhaps the worst sensation of all was the perceived absence of the Lord I loved. I couldn’t reconcile my sorrows with his apparent indifference. It seemed as if he had “forgotten to be gracious” to me — as if “in anger” he had “shut up his compassion” (Psalm 77:9). Surely God saw how hard I’d been trying and knew how long I had been crying. So why let me sit in a darkness that I’d been striving for years to stay out of? I felt so ashamed of my struggles. I felt like a God-forsaken failure.

It wasn’t until I was hospitalized that God let me hear how cruel my self-talk had become. I was so determined to be free from depression that the restless pursuit of that goal became my motive for living. In desperation, my hope shifted off of Christ and onto a change I couldn’t produce on my own. So, whenever hurt and heartbreak left me feeling overwhelmed again — whenever I couldn’t “snap out” of my miserable mood — I felt like an embarrassment of a believer. I despaired of life itself.

Unbeknownst to me — yet fully known to God — desperation had driven me away from his grace (Galatians 3:3; 5:4).  
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