Healing from Depression

I've known for quite a while that I eventually needed to write this blog post and let everyone know what God's done in my life, but for a variety of reasons, I've been putting it off. For one, I didn't know if the healing would "stick." I've struggled with depression for so much of my life, I thought surely it would return sooner or later. But now it has been nearly two years since God healed me, and that is hard to even believe. Another reason is that I know that many (probably most) people who struggle with depression are never healed, and I feel like that is unfair. One of my good friends from high school died from suicide a little over a year ago. Why did she die from depression and I was healed from it? There were so many times I could have died and didn't. I did nothing to deserve God's healing. I am thankful, but it still seems incredibly unfair. But at church today during the worship time, I decided it was time to share this.

The first time I remember being depressed, I was about 10 or 11, but I didn't know I was depression at the time. I just remember a few months of feeling sad for no particular reason and feeling far away from God. I dealt with depression off and on during high school and pretty consistently during college and after I graduated. I started struggling with suicidal thoughts during college. I graduated in 2015, and in 2016 my depression was triggered by a variety of things, including health problems, losing most of my friends from Liberty, and having hardly any friends my age where I lived. That year I had to go to New Horizons, a residential counseling place, three different times. (You can read about my experience the first time I went to New Horizons in this post.)

That year I started going to GAP, Northstar Church's Graduates and Professionals group. It was a huge blessing and so good to finally have friends, but even that didn't completely take away my depression. That fall I was going to a small group that my friend Michael V. was leading. We were going through a video series on prayer called Moving Mountains, based on a John Eldridge book. That week we were studying healing prayer. After the video and discussion, my friend Jess suggested that we try what we were learning and pray for those of us who needed healing. A couple of the people in our small group took turns sitting on the floor in the middle of the room and we all gathered around and laid hands on them and prayed for them to be healed. It was around November or December, and I had just gotten out of New Horizons for the third time and had gone to lots of counseling sessions, tried lots of coping skills, and tried a variety of medications, and was frustrated that nothing seemed to be helping my depression. Growing up in Baptist and Non-denominational (but basically Baptist) churches, I was pretty skeptical of miraculous healings, but at this point I was desperate enough I was willing to try pretty much anything. I asked my small group, and they laid hands on me and took turns praying for me to be healed from the depression. Within a couple weeks after that, I realized I wasn't depressed anymore. Other than a bad few days or a week here and there, I haven't been depressed since then.

Today at church, these songs reminded me of God's power, even over depression.

Shout it
Go on and scream it from the mountains
Go on and tell it to the masses
That he is God
("All the Poor and Powerless," by Leslie Jordan and David Leonard)  

Then on the third at break of dawn,
The Son of heaven rose again.
O trampled death where is your sting?
The angels roar for Christ the King
("O Praise the Name" by Marty Sampson, Dean Ussher and Ben Hastings)


I was reminded of one night in the fall of 2016 when I was really struggling. I was depressed, and there was a voice in my head (meaning thoughts that didn't seem to come from me, not an audible voice) that would not stop screaming at me to kill myself in a specific way and place. The voice would not shut up, and I felt like the only way to get the voice to stop was to act on those thoughts. Thankfully, God kept me from acting on them, and the voice eventually quieted down. Satan is powerful and depression is powerful, but God is still more powerful.

I don't know that I'm healed for the rest of my life--depression tends to be chronic--but I know I am healed for now. It's also been about a year and a half since the last time I cut, and quite a bit longer since I cut on a more regular basis. When I'm not depressed, I don't feel as much need to cut.
This doesn't mean that my life is perfect now. I still have to deal with chronic health problems and OCD, among other things. But I am in a much better place than I was a couple years ago, a place that I didn't even know was possible.

So why do I share all of this? Because God deserves praise for healing me. And because I want people to know that, while God doesn't always choose to heal people from depression, sometimes he does. It is possible for things to get dramatically better and to actually enjoy life again. Sometimes that healing comes through prayer, and sometimes it comes gradually through counseling, medication, friends, or a variety of things. Even if things are really bad now, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll always be that way. There is hope.

2016-2017 small group (missing Jess, Josh and John)