For most of us, this is going to be the summer of fun. Road trips to see friends you haven’t seen in a year. Rescheduling that flight you booked. Or maybe
Country singer Naomi Judd died on Saturday, April 29, 2022. The following day, she and her daughter were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Naomi's famous daughters, singer Wynonna Judd and actress Ashley Judd, tweeted that "we lost our mother to the disease of mental illness." In The Daily Article for May 2, 2022, Dr. Jim Denison notes that depression now affects one-third of American adults, lists biblical figures and "seven saints" who wrestled with depression and doubt, and shares what we can learn from Job's friends and David's psalms.
For Charles Spurgeon, the celebrated 19th-century preacher, depression was more than just circumstantial. When he spoke of it in his sermons and lectures, his examples, which were often rooted in his own experience, included a significant form of depression: the kind that comes without cause. In one sermon, he said,
You may be surrounded with all the comforts of life and yet be in wretchedness more gloomy than death if the spirits are depressed. You may have no outward cause whatever for sorrow and yet if the mind is dejected, the brightest sunshine will not relieve your gloom. … There are times when all our evidences get clouded and all our joys are fled. Though we may still cling to the Cross, yet it is with a desperate grasp.
February 19, 2021
I did not have a word for it until my senior year of college. Looking back, I can see it started before then, in cycles and seasons when I described myself as “down,” “in a funk,” “struggling,” “low.” My friend talked me into seeing a counselor at our college’s health center, and there I was given the word: depression.
It felt foreign at first, as if this couldn’t be me, couldn’t be this thing I was feeling. But it had been so long since I felt emotionally steady, emotionally “up,” that I didn’t remember what normal felt like anymore. I no longer had the energy to wrestle with the thoughts in my head. I was stuck in a fog confused, overwhelmed, suffocated.