I don’t know
if any time is an easy time for a person who is clinically depressed. As one of
those people who has bouts with depression, over the long-haul, I’m in and
out. Not just one day depressed and the next not. It creeps up on me and
engulfs my life for months at a time before gradually loosening its grip and
releasing me. And for someone like me, this is a scary time.
I am
physically struggling with a condition that affects my stamina. It finally has
a name, after many years of referring to it as my mystery disease. That name is
fibromyalgia. Often, I find that my spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. It’s
important that I function, because people depend upon me, and I manage to do
that, but there are times when I worry that they need more than I have to give.
And it takes everything I’ve got to keep moving. After I spend all my energy on
my work as a pastor, my spare time is devoted to recuperating. As a result, my pastor
life is the only life I have these days, and as much as I love my work, I need
to have a life. My lack of a life is starting to feel oppressive to me.
Then I’ve
got life-sucking stuff going on that any pastor of a mainline church can
probably relate to in 2018. I am surrounded by people who are grieving loss.
And I’m not just talking about the loved ones who grieve at the funerals I’m
doing these days, which is far greater than I have ever experienced in my life.
I’m talking about people who are grieving and don’t even realize it—grieving the
loss of a way of life within an institution that, in the way they have always
known it, is slipping through their fingers. I have faith that new life will arise
from the corpse, but the actual dying part is brutal. It’s hard to stay afloat
above the grief that is constantly sucking me under. Sometimes I feel like I
can’t breathe.
If I’m honest,
I have to mention my getting-old struggles… something I don’t like to talk
about it. As I approach the age my mother was when she died, I keep wondering
how it’s all going to go down for me. Lately, I find myself waking up in the
morning obsessed with some past wrong I have endured or inflicted upon others. Do
I need to do an archeological dig of my life, knowing there are a lot of layers
of sorrow and shame and anger I will be sure to uncover? Ugh. Part of me feels
compelled to go there, and part of me wants to leave the dirt undisturbed and
in place. It’s who I am, and I feel a need to be okay with that, if not for me, then for the people who relate to me. Am I the only older person who feels this way?
I wonder if the joy-filled old people I spend time with are just putting on an
act so that the rest of us can stand to be around them. (Come to think of it,
that may be true for a lot of us, not just old people.)
The greatest
joy in my life is my two grandsons, Nick and Justin. But even that joy is
tinged with sorrow for me. When I watch the preschool children file past me in
the hallways at church, it’s all I can do to keep from weeping. Students everywhere,
including preschoolers, are spending time learning how to avoid being shot when
an intruder with a gun comes into their school. The clock on climate change is
ticking more rapidly every day, while those who could make a significant
difference scoff at science. Fear-of the-other is used as a weapon to bolster
the power of the already-powerful on a global scale. Ignorance, cruelty and
immorality seem to be in fashion. It’s too much. And all I can think about are
my two dear grandsons and all the other children who had the misfortune of
being born into this screwed-up mess-of-a-world.
If you
follow my blog, you may have noticed that I haven’t been writing a lot lately. That’s
because I have suspected that what I have to say right now, no one else wants
to hear. If you’re still reading, you may agree. With the little I have shared
with you, many of you will want to fix me and tell me that everything is going
to be all right. Please don’t. I understand your need to do that, but it doesn’t
help me to hear it.
I will
confess that I’ve always been a glass-half-empty kind of person. But lately the
glass seems to be less than half-empty, and I can’t help but think that anyone
who insists otherwise isn’t paying attention.
If I couldn’t
trust that God is loving and good, and somehow God is at work in the world, usually
through us and sometimes despite us, I don’t know how I could get through these
days. I suspect I’m not alone and I share this with you because, if you find
yourself in a similar place, I want you to know that you’re not alone, either.
There’s not something seriously wrong with you if you are disturbed by the fact
that there’s something seriously wrong.
