[Monday's Devotional] - "Where is your god?"

I suffer with depression. Don’t worry, I am not going to go on about me all week, but I do have it. I’ve had it, in various degrees, most of my adult life in fact. I am saying this to you at the beginning of the week because I now believe passionately that you can’t write about depression as an illness without being honest about how you stand in relation to it. Sadly, I have met a good number of people whose in depth knowledge betrays the fact that they have clearly suffered too at some point, but won’t admit it now. The stigma of ‘mental illness’ even makes people who no longer suffer uneasy about admitting that they once did.

My adversaries taunt me, as if crushing my bones, while all day long they say to me,
“Where is your God?” Psalm 42:10 [HCSB]

Depression can be triggered by any number of factors, loss, trauma, stress and many other things can lead to the illness.  It has also been said that the basic cause of depression is not having your needs met.  Well it is certainly true that underlying  most of the triggers is a lack of something or someone.  Needs also come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  Justice is certainly a need and one thing that can cause depression is an injustice done to you that is not rectified or resolved.  In the world we will be exposed to people who have no knowledge of God, let alone his kingdom.  We may also suffer by being taunted or blamed for a situation that is certainly not of our making.  The effects can make us ill.

Well, here is where the good news starts.  Psalms 42 and 43 (they are probably one Psalm really) do not offer us a quick fix remedy, but they do give us a massive encouragement.  When we read a piece of scripture that echoes our own cries we feel encouraged and strengthened.  Like Bunyan’s Pilgrim as he travels through the valley of the shadow of death and hears a voice echoing his own prayer further up the valley, we know that we are not alone and that is encouragement in itself.  But infinitely better is the knowledge that God’s word to us includes the words of those who have walked through the shadow too and, by virtue of the fact that they kept their musings, must have come through the situation.  Best of all though is the fact that God the Son was mocked, misunderstood, unjustly blamed and knew what it was to have people ask where his god was.  He even asked the question himself.  But if you read on you will know that in the end, the lamb wins! You are not alone, keep looking up the valley! 

John Martin-Jones