Introduction

I want to begin with an expression of deep sympathy to the parents of Evan Cheung, Andrew and Julia Cheung, and his sister Ashley. Evan tragically took his life when he saw no way out of the depths of what he was experiencing. I want to say also that you as family and even you as a congregation can easily feel like you are walking with a limp, perhaps wondering why you didn’t see this coming and what more you could have done. I hope I can help us understand depression, so that we as a congregation learn to care for people with depression, and so that we might all experience God’s grace in our weaknesses.

So you will quickly discern from my title, understanding depression, that this is not a sermon on the power of positive thinking, or of prosperity or “health and wealth” theology. It is not a sermon on “victory over depression,” but one on learning to live with depression and discovering grace in the midst of it.

Be prepared for the upending of cherished values as we discover God’s upside-down economy in which our weaknesses become our strength.

Depression is not a character flaw. It is an illness like other illnesses. Approximately 10% of Canadians [1] suffer from major depressive disorders and bipolar disorder in any year, and the figures are similar in the U.S.

These are some of the causes (courtesy of psychologist, Dr. Danielle Vriend Fluit, Trinity Western University):

Theories of the origin of depression (any of which can start the cycle of disturbed neurochemistry):

1. Genetic Vulnerability
2. Developmental/Early Traumatic Events
3. Physiological Stressors: chronic pain, menopause, cardiac, new diagnoses
4. Neurochemical
   1. Levels of serotonin and norepinephrine are altered
   2. Receptor sensitivity changes
   3. The cells they typically activate have lost the capacity to respond
5. Hormonal
   1. Elevated levels of cortisol, a hormone in our bodies that increases with stress
   2. Early life exposure to overwhelming trauma releases cascades of hormones
6. Circadian Rhythm Theory (wake-sleep cycles, physical illness, nutritional deficiencies)
7. Psychological
   1. Freud: depression is anger turned on the self
   2. Beck: depression is distorted thinking patterns
      1. Negative self-talk, low self-esteem, distorted perceptions of reality
   3. Bowlby: loss during childhood predisposes to depression

Does It Make any Difference Being a Christian?

Being a Christian can be a huge help in depression, but with bad theology it can also be a hindrance. Faith can compound suffering if we believe that our depression, somehow translates into a lack of faith, or that it is incompatible with our faith. It can also create cycles of shame, fear of judgment, fear of others’ responses. The stigma can increase social isolation, which can exacerbate emotional suffering and symptoms, and the incidence of suicide.

We live in a broken world, and Christians are not immune from depression and anxiety. Our biological functioning is broken just like other humans and we are offered grace and healing through medication and therapy and these are gifts from God.

Of course, not everyone goes through depression. Most people have down days, blue Mondays, perhaps, but depression is much more than that. It is a mood disorder which is much longer lasting than a day or even a week. Its symptoms are loss of interest in things we usually enjoy, isolation from people, insecurity, changes in sleep and eating patterns, and so on.

Theology of Affliction

Because not everyone has depression, this sermon could have been entitled “Theology of Affliction” to make this applicable to all forms of suffering which all of us go through. So I will speak about depression as one case of affliction that represents the whole.

This is a topic that is always relevant, not just to the roughly ten percent of humans who experience depression, and not just to their friends and spouses who try to provide understanding and support. It is especially relevant to all of us today in this post-COVID-19 season in which wars are erupting, where fear and anxiety are palpable, and given especially that anxiety and depression are on a continuum.

This sermon will have three orientations. First it will have a particularly pastoral orientation. When people move into a clinical depression, the first reaction of support people is often to tell their loved one to “pick themselves up by the bootstraps” or to “get over it.” If somebody is truly depressed this is precisely what they cannot do. Such advice is cruel, not human; it is Stoic, but not Christian.

Clinical depression involves a biochemical imbalance in brain chemistry arising from genetics or early trauma, or both, and stress. That’s not to say that sometimes depressed people don’t need the very occasional “kick in the pants” if they are feeling sorry for themselves, and especially if they are refusing to go for help. But I hope this sermon will help all of us detect and care a little better for depressed people.

I am focusing secondly, on the theology of depression, to reflect on depression including my own experience of it, as a theologian, even if the care aspect can never be far away from this.

When I say a “theology of depression,” I am trying to answer the question, how should we think theologically about depression? A theology of depression is a secondary theology, not at the same level of authority as credal theology. But the Christian reflects on all reality on the grounds of the scriptures as the final authority and on the ground of credal theology as it conforms to Scripture, with a view to forming secondary theologies of everything, and so to develop an encyclopedic theology. That is, what it means to think Christianly about everything in the cosmos.

Whilst being pastoral and theological, I must also be personal. So what I propose to do is tell my own story of depression for I too could easily have been a statistic. We need to speak of its symptoms, its triggers, its causes, its management and good practices, but especially the redemptive way in which God has made my weakness his opportunity for work, in me, and then through me, touching the brokenness of others.

But before speaking of my story, I want to speak of God’s story, and then try to understand my story in light of his grand narrative. One window into all three orientations is a passage in God’s story in 2 Corinthians 12.

(Read 2 Corinthians 12:1-10)

I wish to make five observations about our hardships, each of which reveals a theology of depression, the heart of which is that our weakness is our strength. This is the gospel in our deepest afflictions.

Afflictions Remind Us of Where We Are in History

We are in creation history and in redemptive history. Weakness is our strength for it grounds us in history. A theology of depression is theology in tension. The truth is that everyone of us have afflictions or brokenness and in this stage of our salvation history, that is the norm.

What is contrasted by Paul in this passage is his glimpses of the glory of heaven and the earthy realities of earth he experiences. This is evidence that the kingdom had come in the person of Jesus, but that it had not yet fully come. Heaven is coming to earth, but it has not yet fully come.

The Lord’s Prayer says, “your kingdom come.” This implies that it has not yet fully come, even though when Jesus began his public ministry he announced the kingdom. When he arose from the dead and then ascended to Father’s right hand, he was proclaimed king. But his ascension put the final climactic coming of the kingdom on hold. Christ is in a waiting posture in heaven until all his enemies are made the footstool of his feet!

Afflictions in this stage of human history between the first and second advents, between the redemptive work of Jesus and its full realization in the age to come, are normal, therefore.

I am struck by the fact that even the King in his earthly journey here on earth endured affliction. Immediately after receiving the Father’s approval at his baptism, he was led by the Spirit into the desert where he went into a season of affliction. Being in the will of God doesn’t mean we won’t have afflictions. We must not be shaken when we go through afflictions, including depression. “In this world you will have trouble,” said Jesus. Troubles are normal in this stage of redemptive history. Depression hits Christians and non-Christians alike.

The big story goes like this: Creation, Fall, Redemption, but we await the final Consummation of all things. Revelation 21 depicts the time when heaven will have come to earth fully and then, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Until that day, even though Christ has won the decisive victory over death, by his death and resurrection, we endure afflictions and losses now.

Hebrews 2 tells us that in Jesus, the representative Man for all humanity, everything has been put under humanity’s caring reign. In other words, the Last Adam, Jesus, is the new head of the human race, and all creation will be renewed in him one day.

But then the author says, “yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we see Jesus ....” For now, we do not see evidence of that ultimate state of shalom. Instead, we have trials and afflictions, and just as for Jesus, his suffering was the pathway to redemption, so it is in our lives. We live in the “in between times” and that helps to explain the theology of tension in which we live. In this “now but not yet” era the people of God are in fact in a “fellowship of suffering” with Jesus (Phil. 3:10).

We are encouraged to pray for healing of our afflictions, as Paul does here, three times. To pray expectantly as James 5 exhorts us. Yet we are to be wary of triumphalism, of moving from expectancy to demandingness. And of making cruel assumptions about people who are not healed when we pray for them.

One pastoral comment here: If you have prayed or have been prayed for in your affliction of depression, please don’t go off your medications without medical supervision, if you think you have been healed. Antidepressants are not addictive, but you do need to come off them slowly. Stay accountable.

And if God does not heal you, you will need a theology of suffering alongside a sane theology of healing. You will need to seek for how God might redemptively work in you, even as he did in Paul, when God did not heal his affliction. When God does heal a person, I believe this is a sign of resurrection, one which tells us there is a new day coming, and this is meant to encourage all, including those who have not been healed.

Afflictions Remind Us We Are Human

Our afflictions bring us down to earth. They incarnate us. Depression is a profoundly incarnating force. It brings us down to our humanity with a bump. Weakness is strength because in it we discover the reality of our humanity.

A theology around depression is not just about reminding us of history, of the story we are in, it is also profoundly incarnational, humanizing.

(Read 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, 7)

In case I might be tempted to think that my heavenly encounters made me something supernatural, says Paul, I was brought down to earth, made to realize I am human. For us it might be our vocational achievements, our work ethic, our business successes. When depression comes, we are forced into awareness that we are human. Vulnerable. Filled with emotions we have been stuffing down for too long.

My experience of depression has been a journey of incarnation for sure. What I mean by that is a journey towards being made rudely aware that I am human and embodied.

Before my experience of depression and the measure of healing I went through, I was a very driven person (still not totally cured), and as a pastor I was more of a teacher than a pastor teacher. Six feet above contradiction, but not able to shake hands with folks at the door without a lot of internal struggle. I had too many of my own insecurities to enter into those of others. I also believed I was superhuman, and could escape from unresolved emotion by achieving and pleasing everybody in the church I served.

When I was diagnosed with depression, a close Irish friend, Ivan Stewart asked me if I thought I had an “S” on my shirt? The psychiatrist who looked after me, Judith McBride, was such a gift to me. I literally owe her my life. At some point in the counselling said, “Welcome to humanity.”

Discovering I had deeply trapped emotions, negative and positive ones was a welcome to humanity. Discovering that I was an embodied human with limitations was a welcome to humanity. A person with two PhDs has spent a lot of time in their head, spending a lot of energy trying to remain aloof from humanity and its brokenness and vulnerability.

Another humanizing aspect of the illness is awareness that it is a bodily illness and that the body and the mind are inseparable. Many Christians struggle with mental illnesses and tend to spiritualize them. There is a spiritual component to be sure, even as there was in Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” which was a “messenger of Satan,” but there is a biochemical aspect to depression that makes it treatable by medications. If you have diabetes, you don’t question whether you should take prescribed insulin. Somehow, we think depression is different. We need to be humanized in our thinking about mental illness, since it is a result of changes in brain chemistry.

Afflictions Remove the Hubris of Our Success Narratives / The Pride that Comes from Spiritual Giftedness and Privileged Revelations, and They Build True Identity.

Weakness is our strength because in weakness we come to know who we really are.

Theology around depression is a theology of identity, a restoring of the person, in union with the triune God. Paul says in verse six, “ Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth.” Note, Paul does reflect here a very solid sense of self. “But I refrain,” he continues: “so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say (v. 7), or because of these surpassingly great revelations.” Note: Paul has a humble sense of self, and to use his own words, does not think of himself more highly than he ought (Rom. 12:3).

But how did he get there? He seems to admit here that he did have a proneness to thinking more highly of himself than he ought. “Therefore,” he says, “in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Note: Paul knows he is imperfect, and he knows that he is prone to hubris, and has come to accept that his thorn, whatever it was, was needed to keep him humble and grounded.

Not all people are given afflictions because of the dangers of pride of achievement or revelation or giftedness. Paul was given a reason for his affliction; we are not always given one. Be wary of reductionism of the kind that offers pat answers for your affliction. We have 42 long chapters of Job to discourage shallow connections between cause and effect in our suffering lives. “We will understand it better by and by” the old hymn says, and it is correct.

I think Paul’s point here is that in bringing us down to earth, our bodily afflictions bring us to a place of reality and of humility. We are as human beings very prone to idolatry of things that allow us to escape from who we really are, and to project ourselves as something we are not. We also tend to avoid the emotions that are a crucial part of our selves in ways that keep us from being human. One of the many ways in which we mask our unresolved feelings is to seek escape from reality. For some people that means alcohol or food or drugs or total immersion in social media.

For me, it has been in achievement and fame as a pastor or a theologian. This was idolatry. It is easy for pastors to envision and fantasize their ministries in unreal ways. There is true vision and as Bonhoeffer stated, there is demonic vision which we can inflict upon the people of God. The first comes from calling, the second from drivenness. Fantasizing the results of our ministry and the fame it may bring us, is hubris, an escape from being human in community and being faithful to the ministry to which God called us.

I will never forget a professor of church history at the seminary I attended being asked in class what he was most ambitious about. He said, I am ambitious about raising two kids with such a strong sense of identity that they will be able to serve God in a remote village in Africa and never worry about recognition.

The point I am making is that afflictions humble us, and they help us remember who we really are. The matter of identity is so crucial to our being healthy, and one factor in the development of depression in people’s lives is in fact the struggle with identity.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about self-obsession which is the chief idolatry of our time. A true sense of self and humility is not thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less. I also want to say that, and this is crucial in a theology of identity surrounding depression, knowledge of God and knowledge of self go together, and this is what theologian John Calvin called “double knowledge.” Our identity lies in Christ. We need to know much more about who Christ is for us, and only then can we know who we are in Christ.

I have struggled with a sense of self a great deal in my life. Perhaps this is a result of many moves and many different acculturations. My accent is a witness to that, being a mix of Scottish, Zimbabwean, and Canadian. I can barely count the number of homes I have lived in.

On one occasion when I was watching a rugby match in the Borders district of Scotland, I looked around at the scenery around the stadium and said to myself, “I love this country. I think I will ask Sharon if she’d like to return to living here.” I already knew what Sharon’s reaction would be. “You’ll be going home on your own!” I asked myself, Where is my home? Suddenly the Lord spoke to me almost audibly, “I am your home.” I wept standing there with all the rugby fans, and it wasn’t because of who was playing the last game of their careers. I was being held secure in the arms of the Father, my home.

In addition to experiences of this gracious, sudden nature has been the steady discipline in the life of prayer of moving into my identity in Christ in accordance with what God has to say about our identity. Prayer may not be possible when you are clinically depressed. Even the skilful Puritan pastors of the 17th century knew this.

But once you are in recovery, it is so important to rediscover our identity and proper self-worth in prayer by receiving the Father’s love and affirmation expressed in the giving of the Son, by receiving the love of the Son who gave his life for me (Gal. 2:20), and by appropriating the ministry of the Holy Spirit who draws us into the love of the Father for the Son, who empowers us to cry out Abba, and who gives us unique and bountiful charisms with which to serve in his church and kingdom with proper vocation and significance. It is to be caught up into the life of the triune God of grace.

I have discovered that there is something particularly profound with respect to “naming” that grounds our identity as believers in God’s identity. This is expressed in our baptism into the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:18-20) and our confession of that name.

There is a profound linking of our baptisms and that of Jesus. The humanity of Jesus, God made man for us, was vicarious, and that includes his baptism. His baptism is that moment in the beginning of his ministry when God pronounced his identity, when he as a Man received it. Notably, this is the only occasion in all of divine revelation when all three persons of the Trinity are visibly or audibly present: “As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matt. 4:16-17).

When we are baptized into the name of the Trinity we are participating in the baptism of Jesus who was baptized for us in the presence of the Trinity. And so when we are baptized and live the baptized life, we enter into our core identity as sons and daughters in the Son, children in the Elder Brother (Heb. 2:11-13), joint heirs with Christ the beloved Son (Eph.1:5). And we have received the Father’s affirmation in Christ’s affirmation, vicariously.

The way Jesus prayed as described in the Gospels is intended to be the pattern for our praying, for he is, after all, our Great High Priest and we are his holy and royal priesthood. There is a great emphasis in Jesus’ praying on the fatherhood of God. He addresses God as “Abba” (Mk. 14:36; John 17). He is constantly refreshed as a man in his identity as the Son in relation to the Father, by his prayers.

When we pray, it is not surprising that we also cry out “Abba” (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6). This is where we ultimately restore a fractured identity and solidify it in relation to the Father. In the life of prayer. It may well be that we need counselling to recover from childhood wounds that fractured a sense of identity. However, the efficacy of that experience depends ultimately not on the counselor, but on the gracious work of the Spirit who can use this intimate form of community (what counseling really is) to restore a sense of Abba in the soul. We reap the benefit of wise counsel most on our knees in the presence of the Father.

Affirmation was not something that was very prominent in my life. My earthly father was a very good man, in many ways. However, his Scottish family heritage was not great at affirmation. You didn’t affirm your kids in case they got swelt heeds! I do remember that if I got 95% in a test, he would ask me where the 5% went.

I confess that I didn’t take any of this too seriously, until I hit depression and then I began to realize how important affirmation is for a healthy sense of self. I can remember a session with Dr. McBride which began with the words, “Has your father ever told you that he loves you?” I actually laughed and said, “Scottish fathers don’t do that!” She responded, “Why do you think that’s funny?” By the time the session was over, I was in tears as I realized my longing to hear those words.

In my early 30’s I finally heard those words from my dad, and we knew a measure of healing. I received my first hug from my dad as an adult at that age, simply because I didn’t give him any choice when I met him at the airport! The need for affirmation from our earthly parents is real, but whether we have emotionally accessible parents or not, our ultimate healing is with our heavenly Father.

If we have been abused and abandoned or neglected as children, we are prone to depression, and our sense of self will need to be restored. We are very prone to pursue a self that is not our own, and to find in this hubris, this false place, some relief. But it is a house of cards. Freedom to be ourselves is ironically found in the place of acknowledgement of the brokenness of ourselves, the place of humility, not hubris. Part of the entangled web of the self is that self-hatred fuels our achievements, our places to hide from who we really are.

There has been a tendency sometimes within warped versions of Christian spirituality to assume self-hatred is a good thing. Self-hatred is not a Christian virtue. It is a blasphemy of the name of the God who created you with absolutely unique DNA. It is a dishonouring of the name of the Son who thought you were worth enough that he died for you. It is a dishonouring of the Holy Spirit who has watched over your journey from pre-conception all the way until now, who has regenerated you, who has gifted you with precious charisms, who is guiding your story and crafting you character.

Robust character and identity gives you the power to give your self away in self-denial of a healthy kind. People who are secure in their identity, who know their name, do not think less of themselves; they think of themselves less. Darlene Fozard Weaver gets to the heart of the matter when she affirms that, “… the right self love designates a morally proper form of self-relation characterized by the moral norms of love for God and neighbor.”

I am reminded of Jesus in John 13 when he was about to wash his disciples’ feet and then go on to the ordeal of the Cross. Strikingly none of the disciples were able to give themselves to the other. Another Gospel suggests they were arguing on the way to this supper about who was the greatest of them. They had too much to prove and so were not free to serve. Fragile identity led to standing on dignity.

Only Jesus washed feet that day. Why? Because he knew who he was. He had nothing to prove so he was free to serve. Notice Jesus’ firm understanding of his identity: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up” (13:3-4).

Perhaps it was partly in response to this confusion between loving and renouncing the self that David Benner wrote the book entitled The Gift of Being Yourself where in the preface he begins, “It is a profound irony to write a book promoting self-discovery to people who are seeking to follow a self-sacrificing Christ.”

What Benner goes on to say is that “if Christians were to mistakenly reject their selves, they would also be inadvertently rejecting the fullness of the possibility of personally knowing God. All that would be left (often the case) is a detached cognitive knowing of the structure of God and self, a very ‘thin’ existence indeed.”

Having struggled personally most of my life with a broken sense of self, I have found healing in these affirmations which I have tried to appropriate through prayer: I am a child of God and that is relationship with the Father; I am a child of God and that means I am a person-in-relation in union with and ensconced in the life of the triune God; I am a child of God and that is identity; I am a child of God and that means affection for I am in the Son of His love; I am a child of God and that means affirmation in the Son in whom the Father delights, for he was affirmed vicariously for me; I am a son of God (with all my sisters and brothers), and that means heirship of every spiritual blessing now and of the whole creation then; I am a son of God and that means I am an image-bearer in the One who is the image of the invisible God, becoming more fully human every day.

Afflictions Become the Highway or Conduit in Which We Experience the Power of God

They teach us the inverted character of the economy of God. Weakness is our strength only because by grace his strength is made perfect in our weakness.

Theology of depression is that strength in weakness is not just our way of being, it is first God’s. He humbled himself, was crucified in weakness, and in so doing won the victory for the cosmos.

(Read 2 Corinthians 12:8-10)

The power of God’s immediate grace but Paul also received grace from the community of God’s people. The power of God’s immediate grace. The power of God’s grace mediated through his community.

So how do we love someone with depression:

• Listen well
• Don’t be afraid to ask about suicidal thoughts/hold accountable/make an emergency plan
• “Don’t be a preacher; be a presence,” Sparks, 2014.
• “Depression doesn’t diminish a person’s desire to connect with others, just their ability.” Bernat, 2017.”
• Be aware of your own coping mechanisms: urging the depressed person to “pray more” or “be more positive” is more of a coping mechanism for those who don’t know what to say or are scared to enter the dark with a person who has mental illness.
• It’s OK to say I don’t know what to say.
• The best thing we can offer each other is each other.
• Life is made bearable by those who bear it with you and remind you what happened to you is not your own doing.

Conclusion

The best way to express this is to tell my personal story that involves depression. Not because I have more brokenness than others, many of you will have had much tougher losses and much greater brokenness. Not because I love doing this, very hard to talk about myself. I do so only because I hope my being vulnerable can help others in the journey.

Vulnerable but not self-attracting. My story will, I hope, reflect this third point that afflictions are an opportunity for the redemptive grace and power of God. Not because I am an expert on depression, I am not a psychiatrist or even a psychologist.

Just a point of clarification. The “Dark Night of the Soul” as St John of the Cross described it in the 16th century, is not the same as clinical depression. Mother Theresa of Calcutta suffered this dark night from 1948-1997. She said to her fellow nuns at one point, “If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into.”

Having that experience may not mean you are depressed. We are prone to circumventing God’s work in our souls by avoiding these seasons and the lament that is described in many psalms, and in so doing we miss out on what God wants to do within us. Depressed people will almost certainly feel at times like they are in the dark night, but the dark night does not mean we are depressed or need meds.

The dark night is more about sadness and a sense of the distance of God. Depression is more like a frozen state where you can’t feel feelings at all, and is characterized by insecurity, loss of interest in things we once enjoyed, and suicidality. And for depression, self-diagnosis is notoriously unreliable. Believe your spouse or close friends. Listen to your doctor, your psychologist or psychiatrist.

And now, MY STORY of Redemption:

In my early thirties, while pastoring a church in the Vancouver area and studying at Regent College, I suddenly found myself in a serious clinical depression. These were my symptoms: I was unable to concentrate, unable to sleep, deeply insecure and clingy—as if reverting to childhood—and suicidal. I assumed this was the end of pastoral ministry for me.

The depression was triggered by the withdrawal of the affection of my amazingly supportive wife. I had exasperated and exhausted her by my driven-ness and emotional detachment. She was unable to prop me up.

But the real issues were not with her. I had been unaware until the depression that I had unresolved feelings of loss and anger stemming from a missionary boarding school experience in Africa at the age of six, for my first two years of schooling. This had seriously damaged bonding with my parents. I lived in pseudo-independence of them, and pretty much everybody else. My wife’s emotional withdrawal simply recapitulated that earlier deep loss I hadn’t come to terms with.

Through medication, a gift of God’s common grace to us in our fallen-ness, and in-depth therapy with a psychiatrist, Dr. Judith McBride, I slowly began to feel the feelings that had been sublimated for so long, and began to be more in touch with my emotions, and more available for relationship. She had unforgettable insights.

On a day when I was dead certain that I could no longer be a minister of the gospel, being disqualified by depression, she said this: “Ross, your greatest ministry will come from your deepest brokenness.” The upside-down nature of the economy of grace has made it so. Post-depression, I could enter into the pain of others. A preacher, six feet above contradiction, was made slowly into a pastor. And my marriage was restored and deepened in its intimacy.

It has been difficult for me to receive love. This is a result of a number of factors including my early loss, being Scottish (!), being heady. I began to be able to receive the love of God and others in the midst of my healing from depression.

In the thick of the worst of my depression, my wife became ill with hepatitis A. I did not take any time off during this depressive episode, and so I continued to preach and pastor, hiding my illness from a congregation I was afraid to trust (now I speak freely of it). One particular Monday after a Sunday (preachers know about this), in the depths, on a day I neglected my Bible reading habit, God’s love met me through a hymn sung by Richard Allen Farmer of Gordon College. It went like this:

Loved with everlasting love, led by grace that love to know,

Spirit breathing from above, Thou hast taught me it is so,

Oh what full and perfect peace, Oh what rapture all divine,

in a love which cannot cease, I am his and he is mine.

His forever, only His, who the Lord and me shall part …[2]

These words suddenly became much more than words to me. I felt the love of God. It overwhelmed me. I wept like a baby for the first time in my adult life. I began to recover an identity in relationship with God.

In the midst of this strange “warming,” I felt assured by the Father that he had never left me, even in the boarding school days I had blocked out. His intimate, covenant love had followed me and always would. Although my depression was not all healed, I had experienced a touch of the love of the triune God. Later, when I shared this encounter with the psychiatrist, she shrewdly observed that I had experienced this grace on a day when I least deserved it. For an approval-seeking perfectionist, this was amazing grace!

Lest this sound like a triumphalistic little story with a neat little bow, discovering over the years that I am prone to recurring depressions, and that I had a diagnosis—“bipolar disorder type 2”—has been sobering. I have a chemical imbalance and now, for about 25 years, I have been on a low dose of lithium and an old tried and tested tricyclic antidepressant. These are a grace to me every bit as much as insulin is for a diabetic. Do I sometimes long to be off them? Occasionally. But I persist in this act of receiving grace every day. Some might say I am a well-managed, high-functioning depressive! God graciously sustained me even through the illness and loss of my first wife Sharon to cancer.

I have learnt that this side of the eschaton, there isn’t always a quick fix for things. Sure, I believe God can heal me from depression, but it seems that his grace and power are just as much at work in me with my limp than were I to be healed (2 Cor. 12:8-10). Some people have much greater difficulty being diagnosed, and great difficulty finding the right antidepressant, and getting stabilized. Some people never find stability. God is there for us no matter what, and even though we tend to isolate, cling to friends, and friends, take seriously listen when they have express suicidal isolation. And look for the grace of Jesus that is always there if we seek it.

Afflictions can inspire hope: weakness is our strength because it draws us into the future, it reminds us of our great eschatological hope!

A theology of depression is a theology of hope that somehow can burn more brightly in the depressed. There is a not yet and when things seem unbearable, see the future that is assured in Christ. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” What awaits all believers is an eternal weight of glory!

If I am asked if Evan is in heaven, I will say categorically, yes! His Saviour lived and died to reconcile all humanity. He was a person of faith, and had appropriated that. Was he fully in touch with reality when he took his life? I suspect not, because what he did was not a sane act. Do I believe God overlooked his fatal mistake? Yes. I have faith that he did. There was only one sin that Jesus spoke of as unforgiveable and that was blaspheming the person of the Holy Spirit.

I have known great preachers and pastors who have taken their lives too, mostly because they went undiagnosed and were in societies with little awareness of the illness. Like Evan they have been welcomed into the presence of a Saviour who entered deeper depths than we could ever know, and in doing so worked out our redemption, who “forgives all ours sins” and will one day “heal all our diseases” (Ps. 103:3). And here and now he ever lives to make intercession for us: “He is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).

This is how the gospel is lived in depression.

[1] Statistics Canada reported 7.6% with major depressive disorder, and 2.1% with bipolar disorder, for 2022: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca ›

[2] Lyrics: George Wade Robinson (1838-1877). Trinity Psalter Hymnal #483.