When I was young, as in, an actual literal child, I took myself extremely seriously and was very easily embarrassed and/or offended. Not my best trait, for sure. As a twenty-and-a-half year old, I’d like to think that I’ve come really far since then, but the truth is I’m roughly the same in the core of my being. I’m never as different as I think I am. I remember considering entering my twenties as some giant leap into secure adulthood, and I assumed that I would have everything figured out. The truth is somewhat different.

It’s not to say that I don’t have some very important ducks in a row. I’m halfway through my junior year in college, I have so many friends that I truly love, I have four good jobs, and a family I fit into well. I have plans for my future, though my plans don’t generally pan out the way I thought they would. Ultimately, I serve a God that I trust and I believe is the source of the truest good, the truest beauty, and the greatest truth. I have so much to be thankful for and so much to love. So what’s the hang up?

I get stuck. I am often trapped in the confines of my feelings and observations and I can nosedive so severely that I seem to only see where my feet are, but not far enough to see where to take a step or move forward. I don’t always have great perspective. I spiral out, and I forget to communicate, and suddenly I’m sinking into the waves of past shame, or fear, or a quiet, quitterly (as my mom always said) spirit. My generally optimistic outlook on life can be blown out like a candle so quickly that it makes my head spin. It’s dark in my head, sometimes, and it’s hard to get out. In a sense, it’s like the feeling of letting your eyes unfocus. It’s blurry, and you can’t make out any definition in the things in front of you, but it’s oddly comfortable and nice to just zone out. I’m mentally and emotionally zoned out, and I just don’t have the grit to turn on the light. As the kids say, I’m cooked.

But I’m not actually completely cooked. As Billy Crystal says in The Princess Bride, I’m only mostly dead. Here are my observations from the dark:

1. Perspective is necessary (but it doesn’t invalidate difficulty).
2. Love is not enough (but it’s unavoidable and ultimately worth it)
3. Life is meaningless without faith in something greater than the world has to offer.

I remember reading Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery when I was eight or nine, and there was a line that burrowed itself so deeply into my psyche that I’ve never forgotten it. In a funny and small way, it changed me.

“Anne laughed and sighed. She felt very old and mature and wise — which showed how young she was.”

I felt stricken after reading this the first time, and I promised myself that I would always remember how young I was and how unwise and immature. I would always maintain perspective. I haven’t done this perfectly by any stretch, but I’ve sought to ride the waves of adolescence and early adulthood with the understanding of “Wow, this moment feels so big, but I am so young and someday I will look back and remember how young I am, so everything will somehow be okay. After all, it could always be worse.”. It helped me, but every coin has two sides. In the face of genuine pain, this can be a method of emotional invalidation. In the face of grieving death and the loss of wonderful things and people that I took for granted or put my security in, I felt angry that it hurt as much as it did. My perspective of time moving on should have made it all okay. I assumed I would be stronger, but I felt demolished.

Knowing my place in life and time doesn’t make everything okay, it turns out. Perspective is a good thing, and a necessary thing, and something I think most people could use more of, but it doesn’t fix short term pain, and it doesn’t fill the void of permanent loss. It won’t take it away. It’s like growing pains when you’re a kid, and your legs hurt so bad in that dull, radiating way. You can’t lay still, but you can’t make the pain stop, either. You have to wait it out. Someone telling me that it would go away didn’t make it better. It made me pissed off.

Secondly, love is not enough. Love is, and this is smoking hot take, very conditional. On paper, it is the worst trade deal in the world. The ROI is junk. No matter how much you love something or someone, it is not enough to keep them. You cannot control anything with love. If someone dies, you cannot love them back into existence. You can’t love someone enough to make them stay. Love is a painful, impossible, unstoppable, and fiercely human thing. It is beautiful, and it is awful, and it is absolutely necessary. We must love.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” 

-C.S. Lewis

You cannot spend time with your grandparents as a kid and not think they hung the moon. You can’t look a baby in the eye as it holds your finger and yawns and not feel your heart squeeze with love. You can’t be cold. You must love. Life would be horrendous without love, like Lewis describes. Losing someone you love is agony in a way I cannot explain and couldn’t understand til I experienced it. But I wouldn’t trade loving, not for a second. But I cannot love dead people back to life. I wish I could. I wish I could so badly.

So what to do at the end of it all? Where do we turn? How do we hope? How do I make sense of anything in my life and what makes it worth it? At my darkest times, reality is heavy. The people who love me are not enough to keep me here. They cannot love me enough to make me love the way my life feels right now, or make it seem worth it. They are not enough hope. I care about them tremendously, sure. I want them to be okay. But I don’t care if I’m here with them. They would be fine without me, after all, time moves forward. Love is not enough. Perspective, perspective. My mind twists good things with horrific ease, the little jerk.

First of all, selfish. Second of all, fool. Third of all, if I put my faith and hope in those around me, what the world has to offer, or what I can do and accomplish, I will flush myself down the proverbial toilet of disappointment and despair, and trust me, it’s not fun down that u-bend. I go there often.

I can only put my faith in Christ. If I didn’t have God, I would have nothing to live for. Nothing else will satisfy. Even though I have spent so much of my life balking this, and trying to be satisfied in anything but God, I keep coming back. As Evelyn Waugh describes in Brideshead Revisited, I am a fish on the line, and God allows me to wander and fight, but ultimately I am reeled in again and again.

In Christ, we are called to rejoice in our sufferings. I struggle with this because it makes me angry to think that I would be called to rejoice in the face of death and pain and grief. It feels perverse. But we are called to this because of the promises of God. God says in His word that the joy of the Lord is our strength (Nehemiah 8:10) and that His power is made not just good, but perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).
We rejoice because our suffering produces endurance and perseverance in Christ, and for Christ. Not from our merit or for our own sakes, but for His glory and our good (Romans 8:28). We are called to this obedience, and we are given the strength to cling to God and love God and one another as He loves us, for from him and to him and through him are all things, to Him be the glory forever, amen (Romans 11:36).
Endurance produces character, which by definition means sustained strength, consistency, and refinement. Endurance through pain on this earth is a means of sanctification by and for the Lord. True character, by this definition, is so far from us, but found in the Lord and in the Lord alone.
Character produces hope. As we grow more aware of the contrast of God’s beautiful perfection and our sin, and we turn our eyes to Christ, we become, in the words of Shakespeare, more rich in hope.
Lastly, this hope does not put us to shame. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of shame. This is a promise. Hope does not put us to shame. In spite of our sin, in the face of pain and death and stress and fear and valleys of grief that are suffocating and seem never ending, hope in Christ does not put us to shame, and nothing can separate us from His love when we are in Him. Hope in ourselves, when sorrows like sea billows roll, causes us to sink like Peter. But when we stand in the light and turn our faces to the assurance of Christ’s strength rather than our own meager weakness, and the things of earth grow strangely dim, then and only then can we truly sing, “whatever my lot, it is well, it is well with my soul.”.

That makes it worth it. If I didn’t have something outside of this world to hope in, I can confidently tell you I’d be dead. I am not disillusioned. I am dead in my sin, as we all are destined to be, but made alive in Christ. That is the proper perspective, that is the reason we love with hope. That is what unclogs me from the u-bend of depression. Truly, praise God.