A Christian Look at Anxiety and Depression: A Testimony

Anxiety is fear looking for a cause. Depression is sorrow looking for a source. Once they lock on to a molehill, they make it a mountain while turning a blind eye to Jesus. Oh, and it can be debilitating.

Most people do not know this about me, but I have struggled with a chronic illness for the past 20 years. My condition has a way of effecting my nervous system in several ways. For the first several years, one of the most devastating symptoms I dealt with was anxiety. Of all the physical pain, all the dietary restrictions, and the inability to do many of the things I loved, nothing was as destructive as the fear I faced when the anxiety would strike.

These were certainly my darkest years. I remember the day I figured out how it worked. I would start to feel anxious and then my mind would search for something to cling to as its cause. It would go something like this. I would be driving home from work and the anxiety would be raging. Though nothing was wrong, I would feel like I was in danger. I remember thinking, “with my health and limited diet, it is a good thing I live in a free and prosperous country where I am can choose to eat when and what I want.” Then the thought would come, “What if the situation changes? What if you get sent to jail or something.” This would cause a spike in panic. I would immediately calm my nerves by reminding myself of the fact that I have never done anything criminal that would require jail time, and then the anxiety would do what it does so well. It would reminded me that that I could be falsely imprisoned. That was just one scenario, and there where many others. Loss of life, loss of loved ones, loss of job, loss of reputation, all of these were free game for my anxiety.

Reading this, you might chuckle like I do now, but at the time the threat felt real. My nervous system would tell me I was in serious danger. That is the power of an anxiety disorder, and depression often works the same way with feelings of sorrow and despair. It cannot be laughed off. Even when you understand how it works, the emotional pain is real.

The area it affected me the most was in how I perceived my relationship to Christ. I remember thinking, when the anxiety was in full swing, that I was hopeless. This was during the time when Mercy Me’s song, I Can Only Imagine, was topping the charts. There is a lyric in there that says,

Will I stand in your presence
Or to my knees will I fall

I would instead say.

Will I stand in your presence
Or will I even be there at all

I cannot tell you how terrifying those times were. I repented of every sin I could think of, and then, like Luther, I began repenting of things that probably weren’t sins at all. During this time, I realized I am not the master of my fate. I am not the captain of my ship. It was here I began to turn my eyes away from myself and back to Jesus. Two truths gave me footing. Was God powerful enough to stop this? Yes. And did He know what I was going through? Again the answer was, “Yes.”

With these two truths, the sovereignty of God began take root. Regardless of how I felt, the word of God said I was His child. This meant He loved me. So if He knew this was happening, and He was powerful enough to stop it, it must be His decision that I face this: a decision He made because He loved me.

I would cry out to the Lord and say, “If you want me to draw close to you, why would you allow me to face something that literally makes you seem unapproachable?” Even though my anxiety turned a blind eye to Jesus, and every emotion in my body said He was not there for me, I had something more secure and more trustworthy than my feelings. I had the word of God.

My anxiety forced me to trust His word regardless of my fears. He is greater than our feelings. Nowhere in the scripture does it tell me to trust my emotions, but it continually tells me to trust His word.

The Lord began to give me a firm scriptural footing. The anxiety still raged, and I was still miserable, but I had a foundation. I remember attending a get together at a friend’s house. It was one of those beautiful summer evenings when everything was just right, and my soul was in anguish. I remember looking at the beautiful setting sun and saying to myself. “I may never have never have another pleasant moment in this life, but I have Jesus and He is everything” I began to see that this life is not the place we are called to rest. Our rest comes later.

This life is where we are to reflect the light of Jesus, and often, the light shines brightest in dark places. I would regularly find comfort from His word that I would have never known existed had I not been chained up in the prison of anxiety. I also began to notice that he would put someone else in my path that needed the same comfort I had been given. Had I not experienced a similar darkness, I would not have been able to comfort them in the Lord.

There are many other things I learned during this time. For example, I began to realize just how many worship songs focused on me, the singer, and how I was feeling. What I needed most during this time was not music that pointed me to my feelings, what I needed was praise that pointed me to my God. This and many other things I will need to elaborate on at another time, but let me close with the fact that the Lord did eventually move me out of that period of my life.

I still struggle with chronic illness, but the symptoms are different now. They can still be devastating, but the anxiety is not what it used to be. Now, my feelings often do line up with the truth of His word, but I still know where my foundation lies. I am not anchored to the sinking sand of my emotions, I stand on the solid rock of the word of God.

If you are reading this and you are facing a similar struggle, I hate to tell you this, but there is nothing I can do to make it end. There are paths to improvement you should be seeking like counseling, medication, and relaxation, but most importantly, trust His word, not your feelings. As His child, even when the Lord seems to be pushing you away, He is doing it in love, and you are about to learn things you would never know otherwise.

Charles Spurgeon used to suffer with depression, and when it would hit, he would hate it, fight against it, and get excited to see what God was about to do because God always ended up using it for good. It was one of the ways God taught Spurgeon how to speak the word deep into our hearts.

Take heart, your grasp on your Savior is not what keeps you safe, it is His grasp on you. He may turn you every which way, but He will never turn you loose. In God’s hands, your valley of trouble can be a door of hope.

-D. Eaton