Dealing with Depression

Psa 102:1 A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the LORD. Hear my prayer, O LORD, and let my cry come unto thee.

A selfish person always finds it hard to get un-depressed. Even with medication. That's because all sources of happiness lie entirely in the circle of himself, so when he is sad all his resources run dry. A person who is unselfish has other wells to draw from besides those that lie in himself. Take out your purple pen and I'll tell you what to do.

• First, go to God. Through prayer, God is always there and always supplying solace to our sorrows.
• Second, there is comfort in God's word. How much do we miss because we are simply too lazy to search the scriptures for God's promises? (Uh-oh!)
• Third, there is encouragement in community. David was so depressed in Psalm 102 that he wrote verse 4.

Psa 102:4 My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

The worst kind of trouble is heart trouble, and it's the hardest to get out of. Nothing pleases us if our heart is unsettled, sad, and not right. So the only way David could comfort himself was in this thought:

Psa 102:13 Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come.

In other words, even though HE was depressed, the CHURCH was prospering. Even though he was depressed, someone else was getting saved. However low he got, at least Zion would arise! (Woo-hoo!) What does that mean?

Psa 102:15-16 So the heathen shall fear the name of the LORD, and all the kings of the earth thy glory. When the LORD shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory.

Stop taking everything so personal, and viewing everything individually. Learn to satisfy yourself with God's gracious dealings toward the church and his people as a whole. The things that are dearest to Jesus, should they not be dear to you? Even though it is real dark right now, can you not rejoice in the triumphs of the cross and the preaching of the gospel?

Or have we forgotten about doing that? Did we forget that this is the only realistic option to faith, and will preserve us from falling into distrust? Don't let your sadness be compounded by selfishness. Look outward and look upward. Your own personal troubles are forgotten when you look—not only at what God has done and is doing—but at what he is yet willing to bring in answer to the prayer of faith.

Try this. Faith and focus. Focus on the right things by faith. Whenever you are sad in heart and heavy in spirit, forget yourself and your small, selfish concerns, and seek the glory of the cross. Seek it. When you bend your knee in prayer, do not limit it to the circumference of your own small life (sufferer though you are), but send a longing to God for more revival among his people. Then your own soul will be refreshed. Why? Because

Psa 102:17 He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and not despise their prayer.

Dialoging with Demons and Dead Indians

The Amityville murders took place in 1974. A son in the Defeo family killed his parents and four siblings. Thirteen months later a new family moved into the Dutch Colonial house where the deed occurred. Twenty-eight days later they were forced to abandon that home in a suburban neighborhood on the south shore of Long Island, New York, "to an unnatural evil" they felt threatening them. A year later author Jay Anson chronicled their ordeal. His book became a runaway bestseller in 1977 (about 10 million copies) and was turned into an indie film horror movie that grossed over $80 million. It was re-made in 2005.

The basis for the haunting of this house was the idea that it was built on a site where the local Shinnecock Indians abandoned their mentally ill and sick, who then cursed the land as they lay a dying. In the movie this is glossed-over in favor of the fable that a witch named the "Reverend Jeremiah" Ketchum (Katch 'em, kill 'em) escaped from the Salem trials and built his house there, which included a torture chamber for Native Americans that was accessible under a basement stairwell (a red room, the gateway to hell). So the premise of the plot is a present haunting as a result of horrible sins of the past.

As with all good plots, the Bible originates this motif. In Exodus 20:5 and 34:7 Moses warns Israel that in the case of exceptional and demonic sins (like idolatry), God will visit "the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." What is the nature of this "visitation?" There is much discussion about what these words mean. But it is clear that they mean something.

D.H. Lawrence made some penetrating comments on James Fenimore Cooper's "White Novels" (Cooper authored The Last of the Mohicans). Lawrence makes an observation to the effect that "the Red Indian" will never possess the broad lands of America, but his ghost will.

Interesting. Here is what Lawrence says: "The Red Man . . . is dead and unappeased. Do not imagine him happy in his Happy Hunting Ground. No. Only those that die in belief die happy. Those that are pushed out of life in chagrin come back unappeased, for revenge." Then he offers this prescient insight on pathological modern American psychology. "At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness, sometimes."

Sometimes. A Korean-born American student snuffed out 32 lives at Virginia Tech (my used book proprietor, a man with whom I have done much business over the years, lost his niece). The massacre at VT was billed in the media as the largest mass-murder in American history. And yet a year before the Amityville murders an incident in Wounded Knee, SD, drew the nation's attention back two generations, to the 1890 military massacre there of over 153 Dakota Sioux. (It was described as a "massacre" by Gen. Nelson A. Miles in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, March 13, 1917. The U.S. soldiers numbered 500, the Indians numbered 350, and all but about 120 were women and children. Over twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor.) L. Frank Baum (better-known as author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) was a young newspaper editor at the time, and wrote in an editorial that he had "before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers . . .".

Virginia Tech. Is it the largest mass-murder in American history? Or is it a visiting of the sins of fathers—sins of racism, covetousness and xenophobia—upon the children of the third generation? Are we haunted by the ghosts of political forefathers who, like Ahab, coveted Naboth's vineyard and, having wronged Naboth for so long, followed it with a final wrong to wipe him out and take his vineyard in safety (1 Kings 21)? How can we reverse this curse, stop the haunting, get out of Amityville, move off Ocean Avenue (or 1313 Mockingbird Lane if you are a child of the Munsters from back in the day)?

And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments, Exodus 20:6.
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, Exodus 34:7.

If, as N.T. Wright has blogged for Newsweek, "Forgiveness means you were wrong" (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/nicholas_t_wright/2007/04/forgiveness_means_you_were_wro.html), then getting forgiveness means acknowledging to God you were wrong. We cannot correct the culture. But each of us can come correct ourselves, reversing the curse with repentance, and stop passing on to our children's children the ghost of sin's past.

Preach Your Way Out

Depression is the common malady of contemporary society. Even for Christians.

God is not unfair. First-century believers suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous physical persecution (study Foxe's Book of Martyrs). Many bled and died because of their faith, as did believers in Bible times. Read Heb 11:36-40.

God is just. So today we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous psychological issues. The emotional and the mental are our arenas of affliction. We face gladiators that are really "sadiators," and the lions of lying thoughts. Satan inserts ideas. We don't take them captive but embrace them. Before you know it, instead of sending them back where they came from, they come out of our mouth as our own. "Spinning" things to our own advantage, grieving the Spirit by using corrupt communication, bitter, angry because of our bitterness, wrathful because of our anger. Clamor and evil speaking spewing forth maliciously, we become gladiators against each other, wielding the sword of the tongue, defending ourselves with the shield of selfishness and insecurity (read Eph 4).

The best way I have found to handle being tee-nitchey is to preach my way out. For you, the remedy might come in any number of like medicines. Study your way out. Read your way out. Pray your way out.

You missed it, so let me explain. This was the idea behind the Psalms of Degrees (Pss 120-134). These were songs of ascent. Pilgrims would sing them to encourage themselves on the journey up to the temple for worship. They sang themselves out.

Since you don't believe me, you need to study the topography of ancient Mt. Zion. The temple was the most resplendent thing in the world. The gold would gleam, and the sun would reflect off the white marble. It was not just a light, but a beacon set on a hill.

Did I say hill? It was not that Mt. Moriah was all that high; it was that the valleys which surrounded it were so low. Even after thousands of years, all of Herod's temple work, and modern improvements, it is a pretty rough place to ascend on foot. Back in the day, it took quite an effort to get there. To remind them that the effort was worth it, pilgrims would give God some "layaway praise," putting their imagination for proper purposes (i.e. thinking about what it was like in the presence of God before they actually got there).

This is the cure for mental malady. It works for anger, depression, PMS. Try a dose of Pss 120-134. Don't take every four hours—take as often as necessary. Study and pray your way out so you can preach your way out. Get a vision across the valley.