Trusting God in Sadness

By Bill Gaultiere © 2009

Depression sucks the life out of more people – including Christians – than any other psychological disorder.  Perhaps you know what it’s like…

• Not to want to get out of bed in the morning to face the day…
• Or to be so lonely that your skin screams out for a caring touch…
• Or to have your mind full of self-condemning thoughts…
• Or to feel so hopeless that you want to die…

I Was Depressed

I know these feelings.  For instance, one time that I suffered from depression was when I was a freshman in college.  I had become despondent because I was a pre-med student trying to become a medical doctor to make my family proud of me.  But I hated biology and chemistry!  I felt sick to my stomach when I dissected a frog!  I didn’t want to give my life to treating people’s medical problems, yet I trudged on from class to class and fell asleep late at night studying textbooks that bored me to death.

In the winter of my freshman year I woke up to the chill in my soul and cried out to God for help.  What should I do?  I needed permission to follow my heart’s desire to study psychology and learn how to help people to heal and to grow spiritually.  But there weren’t many Christians who were becoming psychologists in 1985.  And I was afraid to disappoint my family, especially my dad and grandfather who were so proud of me and told everyone: “Bill is going to be a doctor!”

I prayed and prayed as I wrestled within myself.  I didn’t know what to do.  I felt so trapped and so dead in my soul.  I was so desperate to hear from God.

God’s Word Gave Me Hope!

Finally, as a last resort and not knowing what else to do, I prayed for God to speak to me from whatever page my Bible opened to!  And these are the first words I read:

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters… Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?  Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.  Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live…

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near…  “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth” (Isaiah 55:1-3, 10-11).

These words gave me such hope!  I read them over and over.  I was so thirsty for living water and so tired from laboring and spending money on what didn’t satisfy my soul.  For the first time I sensed that it wasn’t just my desire to study psychology, but it was also God’s calling on my life.  And now was the time for me to listen to God!  Now was the time for me to heed his call no matter how my family would react to me dropping out of pre-med.  (They came to accept and support my decision!)

This was a real turning point in my life.  I thank God that after months of getting more and more depressed because I was ignoring my feelings of emptiness, boredom, exhaustion, and pointlessness and trying harder and harder to fit the mould of a doctor-in-training that I finally got off the treadmill and listened to myself and to God and was able to change directions.

How Do You Respond to Sadness?

Many people that I talk to as a psychologist and spiritual director have made the same mistake that I did as freshman in college: they don’t get help with their sadness and eventually they become depressed.

We learn a great deal about ourselves based on how we respond to the situations that disappoint or distress us.  The worst things to do when we’re sad are the very things that so many of us are likely to do…  Get frustrated with ourselves or someone else, isolate, eat more cookies, pour a glass of wine, work harder, stay real busy, or put a smile on and act like everything is okay.

The Psalmist Models an Honest Faith

The Psalmist is one of the many Bible heroes who experienced sadness and depression and show us how to walk out of the darkness and into the light of God’s love.  David and the other prayer masters of the Psalms live with honest faith in God.

Honest faith. There’s a tension between honesty and faith throughout the Psalter, particularly in the Psalms of Lament (the sad Psalms), which are the most common type of Psalm in the Bible.  Few Christians seem to be strong on both sides of authentic self-disclosure and positive-minded trust in God’s goodness.

In the Laments the Psalmist shows us what honest faith looks like in the midst of real life.  The psalmist cries and yet hopes, complains and still gives thanks, vents anger and yet submits to God, struggles with all that is wrong in his visible world and also learns to see and rely upon the hidden reality of the kingdom of God in his midst.

Jesus Invites us into His Kingdom

Jesus taught us the importance of honest faith for dealing with loss and discouragement when he said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

In Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard has shown that Christians almost universally misunderstand Jesus’ beatitudes today.  For instance, in this beatitude Jesus was not saying, “Cry and mourn so you can get the blessing of God’s comfort” – as if it’s a good thing to mourn or we could engineer our way into more blessings from God!  Jesus was saying, “Even when you’re grieving a terrible loss you still can be blessed because the governance of God is available to you and it is the source of all love, joy, and peace.”

May the Lord help us to live with an honest faith that verbalizes the hurts we experience in our circumstances and puts trust in the goodness of Christ and his wonderful kingdom of the heavens in our midst.

Thank you!

Bill & Kristi