By the middle of my junior year of high school the AP classes were gone. My GPA was plummeting. The running career I had sacrificed my body for — four stress fractures, no scholarship, no medical cause explained by doctors — was over. The joy that came from my musical ability that had been cultivated for years went with it. The identity I had built my entire sense of worth around was coming apart piece by piece, and I had no framework for understanding why.
What followed were years of anger and denial, and a young life interrupted by painful experiences that didn’t make sense. There were even two moments as Senior Class President that I will describe as desperate cries for help—trying to free myself from the pit of despair I didn’t even recognize—that seemed completely foreign to the persona I maintained in public. I was not trying to die; I was trying to make the pain stop. If you've been there, you know it you’ll do almost anything to make it go away.
The incident that changed everything happened during my junior year of college. I was out of state, surrounded by wonderful friends but still miserable. I de-pledged from a fraternity, was seeing a school counselor, almost failing out of my classes and barely holding on. An early Sunday morning phone call told me that my childhood friend— someone who was like family to me — had taken his own life. I went home for the funeral to honor him and let his family know how much I loved them. I saw firsthand what his death did to his family. Experiencing that, I realized I never wanted to do that to my own parents.
What followed was the first time in my life that I addressed the difficulties head-on; intensive therapy eight hours a day for five and a half weeks, and the slow, nonlinear rebuilding of my life. The depression got better with comprehensive treatment. And while there have been wonderful seasons with abundant blessings, it has never fully gone away. So I learned to live alongside it, and life continued — a career that took me all over the world for work, deeply fulfilling relationships with women I loved, seasons of success and personal joy encroached upon by seasons of darkness that test everything I think I know about God, myself, and what my life was supposed to be.
The career. The relationships. The calling to the military service eliminated by bad eyesight; one by one, the mile markers of life I had planned out for myself seemed less and less attainable. But the spiritual question underneath all of it never changed:
How can a loving God allow this?
I have spent decades with that question. I have studied Scripture relentlessly, not to find comfort in in the salve of easy answers, but to really know whether the truth of the Bible holds up under the full weight of a lifetime of suffering.
Here is the conclusion I have drawn after nearly four decades of living inside this: while my feelings are real, misperceptions driven by depression are not true simply because they carry such weight. The Scriptures are true because God said them, and for every challenge that’s ever been made against the Bible—scientifically, philosophically, historically, morally—they have all failed
My life has not gone the way I planned, and many others have experienced the same. This disease is insidious because that it robs us of more than just feeling good—it robs us of our sense of worth, our identity, our capacities, and the ability to thrive. What the Bible teaches is that God can use it for good.
I first felt called to start Depression Ministry over fifteen years ago. I spent years resisting it because I didn’t want everyone to know how deeply I am afflicted. So I found every excuse I could to deny the importance of why God has allowed my thorn in the flesh. Ministering to others goes against the instincts I have around privacy, vulnerability, and the way I want the world to perceive me. I am not a psychologist or mental health professional. I hold no advanced degree in theology. What I have learned through a lifetime of searching for the answers of “why” is that this disease doesn’t define me and no amount of suffering means God loves me any less.
The God who created the universe, who made every one of us uniquely in His image, and who sacrificed His only Son so our sins will be forgiven promises that one day all suffering will end. He also tells us that along with loving Him as best I can, I am called to love others as I love myself.
Depression Ministry exists because God intends for my pain to have purpose, and because you deserve to know that your suffering is not in vain if you commit it to the Lord’s purposes. This kind of agony is not evidence of personal failure or punishment, nor is it the end of our story. The need for the hurting to understand that their pain is not worthless is important and it may be the very thing He calls us to use in bringing others to Jesus.
