Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

It is interesting that my trip to Lancaster the other evening was much more tied to my emotional health than just what had happened with the church’s decision. My drive was to Wal-Mart in order to pick up two things: 9-volt batteries and my medicine. The batteries were for the Inter-Cultural Communications Course at JAARS. Dana and I are volunteering there as their go-fers. “I need you to go to the store fer batteries.” The medicine has way more to it.
This is one of the more difficult things for me to talk about. Not because of emotional pain, but because how God’s hand is all over it and I want to be sure to tell it with Him receiving the credit and glory for what has happened to me. The two medications are Wellbutrin XL and Cymbalta. To keep you from having to Google the names, they are both anti-depressants. STOP your thoughts and any preconceived ideas you may have about depression because a lot of them are probably false due to the lack of being informed. I know that from experience.
Let me help by saying what depression is not. It is not someone being unable to cope with life simply due to his or her lack of motivation to ‘get over it’ or persevere. It is not isolated to laziness as a root cause. It is not someone just going through a really hard time in his or her life. It is not something that will fall away once difficult times pass and the wind and the rain no longer beat on their house. It is not dependent upon a person’s ‘success’ in life with a job, a great marriage, nice things, wonderful friends, or anything else of the sort. It is not cured by success.
Still with me? So, what is depression and why am I such an expert at it? I’ll elaborate on my unfortunate qualifications further down in the post. For now, depression, definitively given the medical term clinical depression, is a physical problem. Just like arthritis. Just like high blood pressure. Just like diabetes. The difference is that the place in the body where the depression physical problem happens is also the place where we depend on our every thought. Our very control of life. Don’t forget that the brain is an actual tangible part of our physical body that is extremely sensitive. Too many concussions can cause long-term problems. Too little oxygen can cause irreparable damage.
Our brains (I think I’m going to use the term minds for the rest of the post just because brains is icky to me for some reason)… Our minds depend on certain types of chemicals in order to carry out the functions we want and need it to. It is the place where everything in our body is controlled, both voluntary and involuntary.
So, to demonstrate what is happening in the mind when a person suffers from depression, let me come up with an analogy. Have you ever used a bread machine? It is a very cool contraption that is basically a small oven with a loaf-shaped pan. In order to make a loaf, you simply add the necessary ingredients into the pan, set it in the bread machine and press a button. A few hours later you should have a nice warm loaf of home-baked bread. Well, if you’ve had any experience with a bread machine you know how sensitive the ingredient amounts are. If a recipe calls for four teaspoons of oil and you put in three and three quarters teaspoons of oil, you end up with an inedible lump of oddly mixed ingredients. The goal was a loaf and because only one little quantity difference in the equation, the goal wasn’t achieved.
That is what is happening in the mind when depression strikes. In order to deal with life, both the general routine activities and the tragedies and the moments of glee, the brain has to have the exact amount of ingredients to make it happen. If those ingredients are off, well it is a very scary place to be.
Most of the population has all of the necessary mind ingredients to process even the most difficult times of life. Those suffering from depression lack the necessary mind ingredients to process even the simplest times of life.
Also, please realize there is a stark contrast between clinical depression and what is commonly referred to as depression, or being down in the dumps, or just going through hard times. Anti-depressants are to adjust the mind ingredients to their needed quantities, not to be a quick fix for not being able to cope. Please, please, please recognize the difference.
What are some of the thoughts that roam the mind of the clinically depressed? One of the most common is a relentless desire to go sleep, to lie down somewhere that slumber can wisk one away from conscious life and the struggle to make otherwise easy decisions. The bedroom can start out as a refuge for such a person only to quickly turn into a dark hole of captivity. How captive? Mustering up the choice to walk to the toilet to use the bathroom then slide back into bed would be considered a feat. Eating? There is nothing wrong with going all day without eating or drinking in the mind of such an enslaved person. Clinical depression is a very dangerous conditions and I haven’t even mentioned the thoughts of, “Why am I even living?” You can see exactly where that could lead. Hopelessness reigns to the nth degree. If there is any hope that comes into the mind, it passes as quickly as the next breath.

Look at the physical, emotional and spiritual vulnerability. It is absolutely horrible especially since most, if not every single one, of those thoughts are lies. They are tricks. They are shackles when once clamped on to one’s wrists and ankles, pull the person deeper as if there were a solid steel ball on the other end of the chains tossed over the side of a boat with the person attached.

Those are all lies. There is hope. Truth is something you can latch on to and ride it out of darkness and captivity. This TRUTH reaches beyond clinical depression, its… His rescue spans beyond even our final breath on earth. He has provided people, places, and yes… medications to help. Used as God intended, anti-depressants can be what is needed to get the mind ingredients back to their optimal levels.
At this point, you can attach these medicines to ‘man’s fix’ since so many people use them for the wrong thing, or you can see them for what they really are. Who designed the human body? Who created everything in existence? Who numbered the stars in the sky? Who blesses scientists and doctors to even realize there is a problem called clinical depression? Who blesses them with an idea, the means and the success in fixing it? No man does this. God does it. Hope stems from Him and flows to us through many different avenues of creation.
My hope is in Him because I know where the medicine came from that freed me from the shackles of clinical depression. Not just my hope for this life being better without that bondage but that my hope in eternal life is sealed through nothing but a single act of sacrifice on His part.

This is longer than I expected yet I have a lot more to say to those who may be experiencing the captivity of depression or are close to someone who is.

Guess this is a TO BE CONTINUED… ?

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