003. Emmanuel, God with Us
Hey you,
I have struggled with depression off and on for 20 years. It’s weird to live with something like that. On one hand you know the sun shines on a rainy day, on the other hand sometimes it’s nice to have the sun shining on you — where it can be felt. Instead you get this growly thing that lives under your heart and mostly whispers bedtime ghost stories about women who never find happiness.
Will I ever be happy? I wondered. Then when trouble found me (more like I found it) I discovered that we hold the keys to our own happiness. Whether or not I am happy is up to me to decide. No one else can do it for me.
But this, friend, has been years of concentrated work delivered to you in one neat and and tidy sentence. The reality of learning something like that in life is a heaviness of hopes deferred and dreams crushed — spread out over what feels like way too much time wasted. It’s not, but it feels like it. Such is the perversity of feeling.
One does not simply take authorship of one’s own life without being willing to go through some sludge first. You have to earn the authority of your own life. No one else does it for you.
Depression. The dark shadowlands.
I’ve slowly built up who I am, and what it means to be me. In this process of building a person, I have also built friendships and the isolation and murkiness has been undone brick by brick. Getting past anxiety and depression seemed impossible so I didn’t try. I did what everyone has to do, which is to build healing one truth at a time and to start to risk vulnerability. You can’t deal with the thing of tomorrow, you just deal with the thing of today. You can’t be vulnerable for tomorrow, just for today.
This has been a process of learning where I was living according to lies, which is quite a weird process if you are basically an honest person. I think it’s what the ancient writer meant when he said the heart is deceitful and prone to trouble as the sparks fly upward. I always felt a bit chagrined by that.
Is there any use being honest about depression or do you just pretend positivity in the hope that you fake it until you make it? On one hand we’d probably say we should just be honest, but on the other hand I can tell you from experience there’s huge value for anyone to get up in the morning even if they feel awful, and celebrate that they’ve got one at all. It doesn’t feel honest to celebrate life when you don’t feel like life is very good, but then that doesn’t mean that life isn’t good. How then shall we live? Do we make our decisions based on value or feeling? When life doesn’t feel good, and it’s hard to find our value, I don’t know that either of those can come through clutch. To build on a foundation of rock, we have to be willing to deep about our beliefs. Not just glibly saying “I believe in God” but finding the places in your life where his truth doesn’t line up with yours.
The human heart is full of eternity. When I was younger I often imagined myself in vast, empty spaces with the sense of doom hounding me. Like I was in a book where I could see one long sentence of my past and nothing else, and that guided what I thought the present and future could be. The pages rustled some papery whispers of pending death, but truthfully I already felt like I was living death. I wasn’t far off. Isn’t that the plight of humanity? We’re living death.
We’ve got living and the business of living, and then in quieter moments we think about the meaning of life. Definitely we get up and eat and brush our teeth and go to work, but there’s not a human alive that doesn’t sometimes wonder what it all means.
King David is my go-to for the bravery to be angsty and write about it. “I groan day and night! My pillow is wet and moldy!” Before he was that angsty guy though he was a shepherd boy at the bottom of the totem pole with a simpler understanding of life and God. What did he do? Oh, just a dumb, suicidal move to fight a giant. He put himself squarely in the way of death because he believed something. What the heck, David? We all want to believe things, why not believe a little smaller? A little more possible.
Mary, the Mother of Jesus is another one. As a woman, I know how much of a liar I’d be counted as in the eyes of the world if I showed up pregnant talking about the Holy Spirit as the one who did it. She was willing to forfeit even the appearance of her sanity. She was even willing to give up her pending marriage for the Lord.
Speaking of, Joseph. He’s one of my current heroes. He doesn’t get much attention and that is sad to me. Joseph was a real man, y’all. He found the courage to still marry a girl who got herself “knocked up” and give up his manly reputation. Can you even imagine what his friends and peers and family must have said? Ok Mary, who really was it? People don’t just get pregnant. I don’t know that many of us appreciate the magnitude of decisions like this. Joseph had to make a choice to look like a fool in the eyes of everyone.
C’mon man, ditch the girl. She’s obviously lying because we all know how babies are made.
You know why we really say stuff like that about the people around us? Because we know the power of passion and lust within us and just how easy it would be to compromise. We’d make a call based on what we know and feel and have to keep in check ourselves.
Had Joseph been at all driven by lust or ego this story could’ve turned out differently. It takes a guy who has done some honest work on his character to marry a girl who says she got pregnant because of the Holy Spirit. Ladies and gents, this faith of ours is radical, there’s no way around it. If you walk this road of Christianity, you will be asked to do things that are nonsense in the world’s eyes and even many Christians. That even seem to go against the laws of God. He said ‘do not murder’ and then asked Abraham to kill his own son. He made provision, because that’s what God does, but we face some pretty dicey stuff to follow God.
I can think of choices a bunch of Bible characters made that if a friend of mine was contemplating would make me nuts. I would confront. I would doubt. I’d maybe stop being their friend in the same way. Think Hosea marrying a prostitute. Think Esther going in for a fling with a king. Shucks, if one of my friends slept with royalty I’d have a fit. I know circumstances and culture were different, but these people did something really important: they made a choice to go ahead with the impossible. Not because they compromised morality (notice Hosea married the prostitute) but because they believed God and it was counted as righteousness to them.
Our choices matter. Our choices matter so much. David’s choice. Lot’s choice. Hosea’s choice. Joseph’s choice. I know, I’m jumping all over history but I am so excited about what this means about life and God’s sovereignty because you guys, all those people I just mentioned also made some pretty destructive choices in their life. They went the wrong way and the repercussions were HUGE. One of my spiritual choices when I was 12-years-old led to over a decade of struggling with depression.
But such is the sovereignty of our God that he makes space and provision in our lives to turn things around. I probably say it in all my blog posts right now but it makes me almost come off my seat in excitement.
I don’t know what all choices Joseph made to bring him to a point where he was willing to marry Mary even if she’s pregnant but I know one thing. His choice to go with Mary means that he was able to look past his own nose. Secondly, he listened, as evidenced by him moving the whole family to Egypt on a dream. It was just in time too, as Herod cut loose on infant genocide. The word coincidence is not in the ancient Hebrew and while I don’t know how God works through our choices, it is pretty evident that his work will go on come hell or high water. Even watching the story of Pharaoh play out. He kept hardening his heart and so many bad things happened. The Israelites were terrified for years and years, but God kept working at it. His patience was incredible. Israel had been traumatized for hundreds of years, and God had a really strange way of bringing them out of that victimhood mentality. At least, I wouldn’t exactly count getting delivered into a scary wilderness as the place to protect me.
Just as I wouldn’t have dreamed in a hundred years that a killing blow to my depression would come through extra trauma and a relationship failure. At the time I was in too much pain to be able to reconcile my condition to God’s sovereignty. How could this be good. How? A few people mentioned that this did not take God by surprise and it was hard for me to understand. Did that mean he engineered this? He could’ve stopped it? My idea of the goodness of God was based in how I was feeling.
We cannot know the true sovereignty of God outside of pain, because we don’t know it until we have experienced a God who does not forsake us in the middle of the anguish. We cannot bear pain truly in isolation. Jesus in the garden bore the full brunt of that. He groaned for his friends to stay and pray with him but they fell asleep. He echoed the prophecy from Psalm 22, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The biggest lie that makes God’s sovereignty hard for us to accept is simply that we believe we are alone. Scripture is packed so full of God trying to tell us, “hey, I’m here. I’m here. I’m with you. Is anyone listening? I won’t leave you. I won’t forsake you. I am always with you. I didn’t make you to be alone.”
I have found that theology that is not by our side in a time of pain to be not quite the real thing. Which is to say, we might not feel God because the pain is so much, but he is there nonetheless. This is not a matter of theology that takes away pain. Good theology does not promise any such foolhardy thing. Good theology sits beside you in the pain and says “I will never leave you or forsake you.” What I have found over the past few months is that when I doubt God’s goodness it is usually because I have not looped him into my pain. I have not asked him to sit and wait with me. When I do, everything changes. The pain stays, but so does God and somehow the pain changes.
My theology has gotten rather simple of late. If it does not promise to stay with me, comfort me, help bear my burden, or transform my sinful tendencies through severe mercies and gentle hope, then I reject it. If it retains any despair, I spit it out. If it looks hopeless, I turn away from it. If it sells anxiety and worry about the future, it gets shut down as quickly as I recognize it. The brokenhearted learn to differentiate in a way that the intellectual will bandy endlessly. If I have a hope that is put to shame then I know that there are more place I am withholding from Christ, within me.
My heart has been filled with chaff for many years. What else is refining fire for? Scripture gives us much hope and comfort on that score. It doesn’t say if you need it the fire will come. It just says don’t lose heart when it does. We all need it, pure and simple. We are none of us exempt. I think sometimes we are ashamed of fiery trials, because some of our theology still contains the idea that we need some sort of purgatory to be made righteous but this is not the Gospel. The Gospel says that price was paid, and this is something to count as joy because we are getting nearer to the heart of God. He is doing a work in us, a good and perfect work. Like the person who has been obese and loses weight. I’ve been there. With the inner work of healthy character and emotions comes the burning off of the parts of us which need to go. Of course you are loved if you are fat, there’s no question about it. If you have health problems and remain with extra padding all your days you will be loved. The Gospel does not work through our potential but who God is, and who he made us to be. We are meant to grow and change. That’s a promise we hang on to in our body and soul imperfections. We will get there. God promised to complete his work in us.
Perhaps many of you do not know what it is like to nearly cost someone their life. The memories, the smells, the sounds, the feel of the accident are deeply seared into my memory. Until you see tracks of blood running on a road, and kneel behind someone gasping for breath there is much that won’t make sense about the meaning of life. I was out-of-my-mind desperate in my prayers. In that moment there were only two deliverers: the paramedics and God. What could take them so long? Where were they?
It was a nightmare from which I could not wake. I’ve had several bad dreams since and the relief on waking was so profound because I know what it feels like now to have to stay awake to something.
The paramedics do eventually come, but I stood on the hot roadway for hours waiting for the blood to dry as the police questioned me, took my phone, and eventually released me to go home. Home to what? Home to 48 hours, at least, until I could hear if this man survived. Those 48 hours crushed me, and I was in deep shock already. My friends took me to other friends, because I could not stay alone. There, the senior pastor and his wife came to pray over me. They prayed for peace and I resisted that prayer and disagreed with every word. It’s all good and well for them to pray for peace, but I ought to feel none of it.
I told them so, and they immediately contradicted me, which was the kindest thing I think anyone has ever done for me. They said, “L, that’s condemnation and Jesus says you don’t have to feel that.”
It is hard to explain how the story of Jesus calming the waves came to life for me. In my mind I had caused these waves, and effect said I should be drowned by them. The finality of how I had hurt this other man was drowning me and trauma said I deserved it. But Jesus said, “my peace I give to you. Not as the world would give, but a peace that the world won’t understand and you, with the world in you, will not understand either.”
I let go of the condemnation. I slept that entire night, and the night after it, and the night after that with no flashbacks, no nightmares, and a peace which cannot be explained. Where I could not hold on to hope during the day, I held on to the hope my friends had. They held me upright, and prayed, and made sure I ate and drank. They fulfilled the law of Christ, which is to bear each other’s burdens.
The next 30 days in which I did not have my phone, and only heard that the man was expected to be released shortly, were an explosion of life to me. Abstract concepts of peace and love and comfort from scripture became a living and rich 3-D landscape to me. I lived on the Bible. I kept it open on my desk in front of me because I was not standing on my own words or my own strength against depression, anxiety and fear. It was every word from the mouth of God.
The storm was real. Jesus told me so. He told me three specific waves that he was calming, and has been faithful to do so, though I have yet to see the fulfillment of the promise in its entirety — I have trusted him. The choice was a vivid, real one. I could depend on myself for emotional regulation, or I could fall on him and let the storm come. I can’t explain to you the comfort that comes from weeping your heart out before the Father every day for 30 days. I honestly can’t remember if I missed a day in there, but I went through so many kleenexes that I jokingly texted friends when I only had a 3-tissue cry instead of a 10-tissue one. The pain was horrific and it cleaned me in a way that I also can’t explain.
In the midst of that I found my way away from old tracks in my brain that had gotten filled up with cleansing water. This depression that has haunted me all my days with the idea that something terrible would happen to me if I didn’t do things right was still at my heels, but because I had let go of the condemnation of life I was able to finally able to reckon through the high stakes of life, and my specific high stakes. I began to see that God had forgiven me. Everything. Past present and future Jesus had finished that work on the cross. Directly in front of me was the choice to believe that God was good, and that this hadn’t happened as God’s judgement on me. It was a specific lie that I had to work through because in the middle of it all I realized just how angry and critical I believed God to be. You cannot judge yourself or others with anything other than how you understand God. Your view of God, is your view of life. Your view of life, is your view of God. If you are cynical, your God will be cynical and so will be his sovereignty.
I was judging myself harshly but at every turn kept being confronted by scriptures of peace. He didn’t remember my sin, he forgot my iniquities, he loved me so much, he was gracious and merciful. He delighted over me. People in scripture who had killed people on purpose, or were going to, found this peace.
The message was utterly contrary to the message of the world. Every harshness, every judgement I had passed in my life came back to me. As in, actually came back to me. On the judgement seat, I was my own harshest judge, but in the Bible all I could see was the radical message and hope of the Gospel. I saw that I was the keeper of my own depression, my own anxiety. It was I who had kept it alive, and it was I who would have to make the choice to shift my beliefs.
Shifting beliefs, by the way, is an awful like like moving mountains. It takes faith, but by faith you can move mountains.
Like Mary, I had to believe the impossible had happened. I cannot tell you how deeply that struggle went, because I kept trying to pay for the mistake. It’s what I’ve always been taught to do, but every time I would accuse myself before the throne of God, Jesus was there interceding for me. He kept saying, of all things, that he had already paid this debt.
Past, present, and future. What we know and what we do not know. What has happened and what has not yet happened. What I had to reach out and do, was believe it. That’s all, but what a choice. To turn away from my mistake and turn toward mercy… it was massive. Most of us think that God forgives sins, but we don’t know just how gone those sins are because we’re the one actually holding on to them.
Putting on this mind of Christ is not abstract, it is real. Everyday I had to fight waves of this sense of doom about to smash me. It happened the minute I woke up and my defenses were low. Was today the day a police car would pull up to my house and summon me to court to pay for what I had done? Was today the day that I would be unable to pay for my mistake? Was today the day something would go horribly wrong and I’d have to go to prison for manslaughter?
The terror was very real, but every day God asked me, “L, have I changed today” and I would have to say “no you haven’t.” Slowly I began to choose my reality based on who God is instead of what was happening to me.
It’s like this suffering has given me a golden opportunity to take out the faulty wiring of depression and anxiety based on my own experiences and replace it with a trusting view toward life based on his goodness. As I am doing this, I begin to see that what looked irretrievably bad was actually turning to my good. Slowly I am pulling out depression and anxiety by the roots. This monster I had skulked away from all my life because I feared would overcome me, was losing all its power.
The reason that God says it is so important we listen for his voice is because he knows there is another voice which tries to steal, kill and destroy, and if we aren’t listening to one voice we’ll listen to the other. He knows we will make mistakes, and when we do, what we think about God and ourselves is of vital importance. The old me would’ve strong-armed myself the whole way through, according to how I felt. I would’ve acted on my belief, which was that I have to be self-sufficient and get through this on my own. When we are self-sufficient and not listening to anyone other than ourselves, we are isolated and in a vulnerable position to the evil that wants to take us.
In this place reality resizes to be based on us and not God. I think the Judgement Day will reveal mercy to us, and how many times, even we as Christians, refused it and chose a little condemnation, a little judgement, a little self-loathing, a little gossip, a little slandering… and a little of a whole lot which poisons us. The beauty of suffering is clarity. Some of the most beautiful times in the life of any Christian is when we land, bone-crunchingly, on the necessity of living with every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Father instead of our own wisdom. It becomes a reality, not an observant faith. Taste and SEE that the Lord is good.
At some point we must take up our beds and walk it out. Christianity is not only a spiritual reality, but one which is still as true when we are in church, as when we stand on the scenes of tragedy. He is not true and good outside our circumstances, he is true and good within us.
I’ve had to rethink my stance on what I think Jesus came to do. I’ve been reading the Christmas story quite a lot over the past few months and scratching my head. It’s pretty easy to judge the Jews for what they expected Jesus to do. They expected him to take dominion and deliver them. Interestingly enough he gave them an opportunity to believe, him. They weren’t believing anything wrong. God is bringing about a new order of things. We look forward to that too.
But somehow or another we have to take back dominion from the devil and learn to walk in a new reality, in the mind of Christ. Dominion is a calling of ours from ancient days, but we gave it away, and through Jesus we are learning what it looks to walk that out again. We won’t see the perfection of that right away, but it is coming, and for now we take back the stewardship of the earth and all that is in it.
Meantime, we do well to think of our expectations of life with Jesus. Think of it. Dominion and deliverance of a certain sort is what the Jews wanted with Jesus, and he refused to deliver as expected. He’s still doing that. I wanted him to deliver me from my depression and he gave me a choice to believe in his goodness when everything around me was falling apart. Handful by handful, root by root, he has been working with me to root out this mess inside me. To clean it up and then to heal. It blows me away that my golden opportunity came surrounded by trauma and relationship dysfunction. Such is the sovereignty of God. He takes what the enemy means for evil and turns it for good.
No good parent does everything for their children, but every good parent watches over their children.
Jesus doesn’t tend to deliver us in the ways we think he will. If he didn’t do it for the Jews he’s not going to do it for us. He is the salvation of the world, but it’s a little different than we think. He is raising us up to work with him to change our hearts. He is healing us so we can join the army and fight. This idea that what we do until heaven doesn’t really matter is utter balderdash. It matters, it matters greatly. Jesus gave up his life for us in a free gift of salvation, but we dare not bury our talents in the ground. No sirree. “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”
This is the belief from which the Mary’s and Joseph’s of the world are born. Those who know that our hearts and lives become transformed by following Christ.
Jesus is my all in all. I depend on every word from the mouth of the Father. I would not be alive except for God. I would not have a prayer if not for Jesus. His grace is full, free, and he has paid a debt for me I cannot repay. That will make me eternally grateful.
I have been learning to take what is my pay grade and make those choices, and no more. My concern is to keep my heart on, my trust activated, and to be innocent and wise. If David, and Mary, and Rahab, and Esther, and Hosea, and Jesus have taught me anything it’s that believing in God, having faith, is not safety. It is in actually living out the reality of good news. I have learned through suffering that is much larger than I, that God is much larger than I and is planning things for my good. I also plan, but then he directs my steps.
In the end God’s sovereignty is displayed magnificently in this one simple phrase, “Emmanuel, God with Us.” The King of Heaven stepped out of glory and into our hearts. Sovereignty to me is the mind-boggling realization that God makes his home inside limitation: me. You. Whosever wills, may come. Why else would God send a message like coming as a baby, to live inside a tight womb for nine months? There may be more than one reason because God works in layers so much higher than us that it will take a long time to grasp, but this much I can understand. God with us, is God within us. We are his holy temple. He has made a way through Jesus to opening the Holy of Holies right in the very core of each one of us.
The devil might tamper with our beliefs. He might try to dampen the glory of God through things like my depression, but there’s absolutely nothing he can do if I turn around and say “yet I will praise God.” He is powerless against such a reality of heaven.
It is impossible for me to fight depression on my own. But in this depression God came and made a home inside me and the lights are being lit, oh yes they are. The veil has been torn and Jesus even now, sits in the Holy of Holies. The devil can’t do a thing because he lied to me and said Jesus could not enter into a place such as mine, but Jesus did exactly that. He came to a world that is torn apart and suffering and he got torn apart and suffered his way to our hearts. He knows every one of my sorrows and griefs intimately and he knows every one of yours. There’s no way the devil can win out against a God who triumphs over death that way.
Though I am slain a thousand tomorrows, yet I will praise him.
Love,
-L. Raine
