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Sadness, Depression, and the Christian

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He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
—Isaiah 53:3-4 ESV

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
—Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 KJV

We live in an age when sadness is under assault.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a fellow Christian. At one point, I brought up some of the sadness I felt over the state of the world 2010 and some genuine losses in my life and the lives of family members. In the course of the discussion, he mentioned antidepressants.

Back in the dark ages of 40 years ago, depression was considered a debilitating mental illness. To be diagnosed with depression, one had to be nearly nonfunctional, unable to perform even simple tasks, such as getting out of bed in the morning. I had a college professor who talked about losing three entire years to crippling depression. He said he couldn’t think and could barely lift himself out of his favorite chair. Depression had rendered him completely inert.

I like to listen to Science Friday on NPR. Recently, they did a program on depression. During the interview, the two experts discussed the explosion of cases of depression diagnosed today and the reality that antidepressants are the most common drug prescribed, with one person out of every 15 in America taking them. And those numbers are growing.

Those experts noted disconcertingly that pharmaceutical company marketing departments helped manufacture much of the need, dramatically reducing the threshold for what is considered depression. Doctors bought into that marketing. Now, we have created an atmosphere of  “Sad? Well, there’s a pill for that.”

In effect, in many cases, we are using drugs to eliminate ordinary sadness.

A friend who works with mentally ill children attended a recent symposium. He later wrote that an expert on depression divulged that for most people, if left to a natural grief-resolution process that omits drugs, feelings of sadness equated to “depression” typically fade away on their own in about nine months. Intriguingly, that expert works for a drug company that sells antidepressants.

Something is terribly wrong in our society when we are unable to separate normal sadness from debilitating depression.

March 29 is turning out to be a sad date on the calendar for me. My mom, a woman greatly loved by everyone who knew her, died on that date nine years ago. In one of those terrible synchronicities of life, I got the news that the man who led me to Christ, the most Spirit-filled person I ever met, and the one whose life still serves as my example of what it means to be a Christian, died yesterday. He mentored me in what it means to live by the Spirit and to listen to what God is saying. He loved people unconditionally. God spoke to him and used him to always give a word in season. Fred Gliem was 90.

Even though Fred lived a full life and impacted many for the Kingdom, his death makes me sad.

Some Christians out there don’t like sadness. Like the society around them, they want to replace sadness with a sort of Pollyanna-ish happiness that never abates lest one discredit the joy of having Christ dwell in one richly. I hear about Christians who want to turn every funeral into a cause for celebration. Honestly, I wonder what those folks are smoking.

Here’s what the Bible says is the reaction of Spirit-filled people to the death of one of their own:

Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him.
—Acts 8:2

Those devout men knew their friend was in the arms of Jesus. Still, they wept and wailed over his tragic loss.

I think one of the reasons why so few people know how to deal with sadness, why some want to toss medications at those who are sad, is because our worldviews allow no place for anything less than individual fulfillment and happiness. Sadness and grief are rendered deviant emotions.

Sadness also demands a response from others. While many emotions can go without comment, sadness can’t. Sadness asks for comfort. And comfort means availability.

Do we make time for the sad and grieving? Or do we prefer they pop a few happy pills and stop bothering us?

Job’s friends are almost universally reviled because God chastised them for speaking while ignorant of the facts. But one thing God did not do was criticize Job’s friends for their dedication to their stricken friend:

Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
—Job 2:11-13

Seven days and nights Job’s friends stayed with him—before they even said a word. They mirrored Job’s grief, tearing their robes and weeping as they took on the dust of his despair.

When was the last time you or I heard of anyone showing such devotion to a friend in his or her time of sadness? Isn’t our tendency instead to quote Romans 8:28 and casually discount another’s abyss? Man of SorrowsHaven’t we become people who blithely say, “You know, they have a pill for that,” so we can go on with our lives, make our next business meeting on time, and not be bothered by the natural outcome of living in a sin-soaked world?

If one of Christ’s titles were not “The Man of Sorrows,” how could we ever claim that He was fully human? No, we know Jesus was well acquainted with sadness. He did not run from that emotion. How then can we?

The Scriptures say that the fool’s heart is always in the house of mirth. The fool learns nothing of the breadth of life’s truths, including the truth that sadness serves a purpose. From its depths come a kind of wisdom that can’t be gained from always thinking happy thoughts. Indeed, a sad face is good for the heart. It grounds us in real meaning and makes us better people.

Listen to “Sad Face” by The Choir:

There’s a crystal in the window
Throwing rainbows around
There’s a girl by the mirror
And her feet won’t touch the ground
‘Cause she never saw the sky so bright
Isn’t that like a cloud, to come by night
Nevermind the sky
There’s a tear in her eye

A sad face is good for the heart
Go on cry, does it seem a cruel world?
A sad face is good for the heart of a girl
A sad face

There’s a woman in my kitchen
With a rainbow on her cheek
Well isn’t that a promise?
Still I never felt so weak
There’s a tiny spirit in a world above
Cradled so sweetly in our Father’s love
So you don’t have to cry
No there’s something in my eye

A sad face is good for the heart
Maybe just now I don’t understand
A sad face is good for the heart of a man
A sad face

A sad face is good for the heart
It’s alright you don’t have to smile
A sad face is good for the heart of a child
For the heart of a child
For the heart of a child
For the heart of a child
A sad face A sad face…

In the Land of Inconsequence

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At 16, I read through Acts and came away understanding that the pivotal disciple in the book was not Paul but the man who stood behind him, Barnabas. In those words, God said to me, “Be a Barnabas. Help raise up future Pauls.”

I entered college a few years later and studied robotics because I enjoyed tech and knew there would be money in it. But after two years, I felt hollow on the inside. I realized that while I was good at computer-related things, it wasn’t where my heart was.

On completion of my sophomore year, I worked the summer at a Christian camp.  Not any camp though, but the one that six years previously was the place where I met the amazing manager of the camp, who introduced me to Jesus and changed my life forever.

I had a rough first week as a counselor. I had a cabin full of rowdy boys from Cleveland who did nearly everything wrong. Yet at the end of the week, I’d seen how Jesus had touched them. I’d understood something about the Great Commission I’d never grasped before.

After the kids left on Friday after dinner, the staff had its worship and communion service. As I partook of the Lord’s body and blood, I remember thinking that each of us had been consecrated by the Lord for this work. Each of us had a holy calling.

Following the blessing of that worship, seven of us piled into John’s enormous, early ’60s convertible (an Impala, or maybe a Caddy) and headed into town for ice cream. John, Lori, and Shawn took the front seat, while Keith, Michelle, Ruth, and I sat in back. The long-persisting, mid-June  sun crouched low on the horizon, the last of its rays golden on our faces as we sped west, the warm wind tossing our hair. Around us, katydids poured out songs of love, and the world burst with life and possibilities.

At the ice cream parlor, Ruth and I hunkered down in a booth and talked about what it meant to have a mission in life, to discover what God intended for each of us, how He would use us, and what the future might hold. I remember feeling something change in me, as if I’d discovered a great truth about where I stood in the vast cosmos, and how the Lord could use me going forward.

On the way back home, under a heavens aglisten with stars, John turned on the radio. A lone acoustic guitar built into a full band, leading into these haunting lyrics:

Ooh, I’ve been running down this dusty road.

Oh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning;

I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.

I considered those words a sign of hope. That not knowing where I would be tomorrow was a sign of God’s joy in taking those who love Him to wonder-filled, unexpected places.

We cruised past a tiny oil pumping station, and a giant ball of orange-yellow erupted from a pipe and roiled the sky, turning night to day. When I looked at the faces of the six around me, I could see the fire dancing in their eyes.

I remember thinking, It will never be better than this.

The events of that summer made it clear that robotics wasn’t the future for me. I didn’t return to college in the fall.

Back home, with “what next?” occupying every thought, I asked to meet a pastor friend of mine named Terry. On a lovely September day, I sat in the courtyard of his church and waited for him.  An ancient woman with a cane shuffled toward the bench I sat on.  She moved about as slowly as a person can and still have the motion be considered forward progress. She eased herself down beside me, took a deep breath, and folded her white-gloved hands. After a moment, she turned to me, called me by name (though I had no idea who she was), and told me that she had been talking with God about me. She then said that God had told her to tell me to pursue my calling of being a Barnabas and to do so in the environment I enjoyed the most. I was stunned by her words. Just then, Terry walked out of the building to my right. I waved to him then turned to the woman. She was gone. I asked Terry who she was, but he said no one had been sitting beside me.

I love the outdoors. I’m a nature boy. I love working with people who desire to know God more deeply, people who don’t want the status quo in their Christian life, who are looking for something more.

Armed with what I’d experienced, I understood that God had shown me a direction. And I took it.

It wasn’t easy. I worked summers in camping ministry and filled in the rest of the year. Eventually, I found full-time work in that field. Even though I had ups and downs, I believed I was on the right course. I started ascending in responsibilities. I trained counselors, devised and developed curriculum and programs, even worked as a camp manager.

But eventually, at the age of 27, my lack of a college degree caught up with me. Doors started closing.

After leading a weekend retreat for my church, someone said that I had a real gifting for this kind of work and that I should pursue a degree in the field. The words stuck.

As it was already late March, I’d missed every deadline to apply to college, but I did so anyway. In mid-April, Wheaton called. I drove up, interviewed, was told they had a scholarship for older students returning to college in Christian Education, and a week later I was accepted and told I had a full-ride for my academic payments. I immediately enrolled in classes related to camping and a month later spent that summer at the college’s camp in Wisconsin.

It all seemed like a dream.

I graduated at the top of my class in 1992. I even won the Senior Class Scholarship for the most deserving senior class student.

I’d worked in some of the best camps in America by then. The president of Christian Camping International and the foremost authority on outdoor education in Christian camps were two of my references. My résumé was golden. Everything was working for me as of May 1992.

Fast forward nearly two and a half years and I’m selling computers, wondering what the heck happened.

The first wave of Catholic priest scandals hit right as I was graduating. In the aftermath, being single and 30 years old didn’t endear me to many camp leaders. Being married made one safe was the thinking, I guess, though I knew that was a lie. Still, the golden résumé,  prayer, and fasting couldn’t overcome the news headlines. It was a terrible time. I couldn’t believe what I was subjected to.

Yet I had to put food on the table.

After the last soul-crushing rejection from a camp that reneged on their offer of  a management and curriculum design job when they learned I was single, I threw in the towel.

A few years later, I was married and working in Silicon Valley for Apple then at NASA. Then came a child and a mortgage. The bottom fell out of tech and I changed careers yet again.

I live on a proto-farm now and write for a living. Most of my income goes to pay for insurance policies. My 9-year-old son is gifted and bored with school. He attends a special program for gifted kids each Saturday. This last Saturday, his engineering class of about 30 kids built circuit boards. My son was the first done with his. I worry how we will meet his educational needs.

The garbage needs to be taken out. Someone has to cut the grass. Weeklong work on taxes beckons. Gotta fill the fridge again. Census forms. The truck breaks down. How do we get to swim lessons now? Did we send in the vehicle registration forms? What day is it today? How did another week fly by?

The juggling goes on an on. So many balls to keep in the air.

Oh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning;

I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.

Twenty-seven years after seven young people piled into a huge ’60s convertible and drove into the dream of a future filled with God’s purposes, I stand on the side of the road, lost  in the Land of Inconsequence, choking on the exhaust fumes.Wandering the Wasteland of Inconsequence

I spent this last Sunday morning with tears in my eyes.

That’s my story. I believe it’s one that many other Christians share, though the details are different. I think that church pews around America are filled with middle-aged people wondering what happened to the mission they embraced years ago. Life became cubicles and rush hour gridlock and the smirk on the face that accompanies hearing the dream stories of youth who are poised to change the world. Those were our stories—once.

It feels like hell living a life of no consequence, counting time until we go to heaven and receive whatever meager reward we earned, based mostly on what we accomplished for the Kingdom when we were barely out of childhood. The Land of Inconsequence is a terrible place to dwell, yet the population grows daily.

God knows most of us who dwell in that land would prefer to be elsewhere. We’d like nothing more than to cast off the burden of a life buried in bureaucracy and striving. We don’t want to look at the mission of the Kingdom of God and think, Hey, nice fairy tale. We want to be more concerned with the fact that Christians in India and elsewhere  face persecution, but we’re stuck on the phone arguing with the electric company, trying to figure out why our electrical bill is twice as high this month.

All the while, what we once were eats at us. The old mission claws at our heart, but we don’t know how to get back to it. We don’t know if we could even perform that mission should it one day open up again. And the days keep falling from the calendar.

Some will say that God closes those doors due to sin, stupidity, and sloth, but I don’t know if that’s always the case. Sometimes, things just are. Yet it bothers me that so many Christian people who once burned brightly now sit in a pew somewhere on Sunday and lament what might have been. They had a mission once. Now they pay endless bills and kill themselves to keep up with the ever-growing numbers on those pages.

I wish I had an answer for this, but I don’t. I’m trapped in the mire too. All the doors closed one day, except for one, and in taking it there seems to be no return.

Is this a sad post? Sure. But I don’t think we can run away from sadness. As Christians, we must be able to deal with all of life’s challenges in ways that reflect the truth of God. Sadness is part of the human condition, and God does not shrink from speaking to it.

The hope that I hold out is that God has an answer. We just may not understand it. Do I think that God is happy that so many people dwell in the Land of Inconsequence? No. But if the Church doesn’t acknowledge the problem, how can we expect to see that change?

I would love nothing more than to get believers together and raise this issue. It’s a dirty little secret, I think, and dirty little secrets need to be brought into the light of Christ and exposed before the people of God. Perhaps if we did this, God would work through us in ways that would help free people to return to those long-lost missions and find a way to escape an inconsequential life.

The Christian Singles Mess

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The man-childTim Challies posted on Facebook this quote from a book by Richard Phillips:

“One of the biggest problems in the church today is the failure of young adult men to value and pursue marriage.”

That quote really bothered me, honestly. It seems like the typical male-bashing that is so prevalent today: If something is wrong, blame men.

It takes two to tango, though, so I can’t see why the blame must always fall on men for the state of dating today.

I’ve been married since 1996, so I can’t say that I am totally up on every aspect of the Christian single scene circa 2010, but still, I can’t believe it has changed THAT much since my single days. So when I read quotes like the one from Phillips, I just have to wonder if people see the same mess I did.

When I was single…

It was almost always the woman who broke things off in a relationship. I knew a lot of single Christian guys, and they were typically the dumpee, not the dumper. These were good guys, too. They WANTED to get married. It’s just that their girlfriends didn’t—at least not to them. So just who is putting off marriage here?

While both sexes have “lists,” the lists of desirable qualities in a mate that women kept seemed to be more unrealistic than the lists of men. What made this more glaring was that as single women aged, their lists got shorter, while men’s lists tended to stay the same. So which sex is making dating harder?

I dated about a half-dozen women before I met my wife. Twice, women I dated gave me the “you’re too nice” break-up speech—only to have those two later date men who hit them. Worse, they couldn’t bring themselves to break it off with their abusers. I pray that a third of women out there are not dumping nice guys in favor of bad boys, but my experience says otherwise. What kind of message is that sending to men who are “nice”?

A man’s income is a bigger factor than single Christian women care to admit. Plenty of good, caring, honest men don’t make six figures. I’ve seen too many cases of women dropping the “poor” nice guy in favor of the loaded playboy. The outcome is self-fulfilling. So which sex is succumbing to questionable motives?

This is not a post to bash single women. Still, all the culpability for the mess out there can’t be dumped solely at the feet of men.

It’s true that we seem awash in Man-Child Syndrome, with men acting like teenagers into their 30s. But at the same time, thanks to the inevitable outcomes of radical feminism, we’ve also developed this almost predatory female who wants to compete as a man in those elements of life we’ve always associated with manhood. Can anyone claim that THAT’S an improvement for women?

Here’s the even worse problem: quotes like those from Richard Phillips. Why? Because the fixes are not those most Christians are willing to examine. We can complain all we want about the state of male-female relationships today, but the fixes do not amount to telling one sex or the other to get their collective acts together. The problems run deeper.

Here’s an example:

Today, young men must compete for jobs against young women. But the playing field is not level. Every study I have seen in the last few years shows that companies prefer to hire women. Men are also cowed by the threat of sexual harassment lawsuits. Having been in several workplaces where a male coworker was sued for sexual harassment, I can tell you that the effect is chilling, even on those men who would never consider saying or doing anything deemed harassment. I remember commenting to a woman I worked with that I thought she had a great fashion sense and was a smart dresser; she responded, “And just what do you mean by that?” Her response taught me that it was better to not talk to her at all.

This adds up in the lives of men. It amplifies the so-called Battle of the Sexes, a battle that didn’t exist prior to the 1960s and the rise of radical feminism. As men are most often the loser in this battle, this contributes to the Man-Child Syndrome.

I also believe that the way we prepare young people for the work world today exacerbates the problems. Beyond men and women competing for the same jobs, we use college as an excuse for job prep. We throw young people into a largely unsupervised college environment, expect them to put off marriage for four years, expect them them put off marriage for more years after graduation while they “establish their careers” (and justify the massive costs of a college education), and then we wonder why dating and mating is a giant mess.

Yet what Christian leader out there today is willing to question the way we work, earn money, and get an education? Instead, we find a convenient whipping boy, the man-child, and tell him to act like a man—when our entire system is geared for preventing him from doing so.

As I see it, the problems are systemic and difficult, which is why it’s easier for Christians to simply ignore them as we pursue our careers and gather for ourselves the only thing that seems to matter in life:  money. Telling men to act like men doesn’t get us anywhere unless we’re prepared to make the changes necessary to mold them into our professed ideal. And those changes may mean revising every aspect of our society and culture.

I wrote about my suggestions for how we Christians can address the issue of singleness in the Church in Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality. I also talked about how we Christians are not seeing the bigger picture in dating and mating in The Truth About Women (and Men).

I wish more Christians were willing to look hard at masculinity and femininity breakdowns in our society today and pose genuine solutions that challenge the way we live. If we don’t, how can we expect different outcomes?