Out of the depths of depression
When I was a young teen, I began to suffer from symptoms of depression, though at the time I didn’t know what was wrong. A gnawing sadness and loneliness characterized my thoughts. A few years later, things got so bad that I tried to end my life – unsuccessfully, as you can guess.
As my misery grew, I began to drink with school friends on the weekends, the chief goal being to get drunk as quickly as possible. I even started cutting classes and spent my days sitting in the cafeteria.
I had grown up attending the Christian Science Sunday School, and though I respected and appreciated the men and women in our church, I nevertheless developed a conviction that God did not exist. Sunday School taught me that God was good and only good, but it felt as though the power of the universe had nothing better to do than crush me completely, without mercy. Still, God was all I had learned of as help in the world, and I didn’t know of any other power that could rescue me from the tragedy of a ruined existence. So with whatever faith I did have, I was continually asking, begging, God to please help me.
That plea appeared to go unanswered. But at some point I felt impelled to read the textbook of Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy, and I went through it cover to cover at least a dozen times. I felt a compelling, irresistible sense of hope on every page as I read about the nature of God as good, and of each of us as God’s valued, pure, spiritual creation. This felt like pinpricks of light in the darkness, an outcome explained by this passage, which refers to God as Truth itself: “Truth has a healing effect, even when not fully understood” (p. 152).
One night, as I lay in bed marveling at the unusual quietness of the evening, I began to consider some of the things I’d recently read that were gaining traction in my thought. Two that stood out were this beautiful verse from the Bible, “From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalms 61:2), and a line from Science and Health: “The three great verities of Spirit, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, – Spirit possessing all power, filling all space, constituting all Science, – contradict forever the belief that matter can be actual” (pp. 109-110). I saw that God, the divine Spirit, made us not as defective mortals, but as the spiritual expression of His limitless love.
After a few minutes of pondering these ideas in the darkness, my thought suddenly became startlingly clear. It was as though, without realizing it, I had been held under water for a very long time, when all of a sudden I was unexpectedly released and shot to the surface. For two weeks after, all my waking moments were suffused with an awareness of God’s infinite presence. I felt genuine, boundless joy for the first time in years.
This was my first glimpse of the reality of God and His goodness, and through God’s continuing grace, it was not my last. All my troubles didn’t vanish instantly, but from that moment on I have never doubted God’s existence and power.
These ideas raised me up above the drowning wave and set me on a course of usefulness and spiritual discovery. They healed me of the crippling depression and gave me a reason to live. Where once I believed God couldn’t possibly exist, now I can’t imagine a life without the knowledge and awareness of God, of divine Truth and Love. When the need is great, God’s love is always greater.
Adapted from an article published in the Christian Science Sentinel’s online TeenConnect section, Dec. 7, 2017.
