— by Ben Freeth

Depression is not something that should visit Christians. There must be something terribly wrong with our faith if it does. Or so I once believed.

In the past year, in the under 50s age group, there have been significantly more deaths from suicide than from Covid-19. For every fatal suicide, there are at least 10 suicide attempts. Suicide is the ultimate measure of love for life—or lack of love for life. Depression and suicide are at pandemic proportions.

Some CEF members will know part of my testimony of pain and loss in Zimbabwe. They will also be aware of the amazing miracle of love that I found for President Mugabe’s youth militia, who tortured my parents-in-law, Mike and Angela Campbell, and me so terribly during that long, cold, dark night in the militia camp in June 2008.

Some will know how dire the losses have been that we, and so many other Zimbabweans, have suffered during the past 20 traumatic years, beginning with the violent farm invasions in February 2000. These include the loss of police protection; the loss of our community, with all of the homes, farms, and businesses; the loss of our own home with everything in it; the loss of my parents-in-law’s home and all of their possessions; the loss of some of our workers’ houses with everything they owned; the loss of our business; the loss of our income; the loss of our bank accounts, with all of our money and savings; the loss of our pensions; the loss of friends through state-sponsored murder; the loss of my father-in-law’s life after we were tortured; the loss of our peace through intense and interminable state-sponsored beatings and fear over so many years; the loss of our country…

These were great losses; but the losses and rejection that have taken place more recently have appeared to me as even greater and have affected me more.

I never believed that, as a follower of Christ, I could lose the gift of joy—whatever the loss, whatever the pain, whatever the circumstances. I thought I knew, like the apostle Paul, that “to live is Christ and to die is gain.”[1] I thought I knew “the secret of being content in all circumstances.”[2]

I thought I knew how to smile through the pain when it came; to look beyond the sorrow when it visited; to know peace in a place of fear and chaos; and to know calm in a place of corruption, great tumult, and suffering.

It was a shock, therefore, to find myself suddenly in a dark place—a deep valley with sides that were precipitous and slippery and in which I longed to be overtaken by death. Terrible as it may sound, I even prayed for death—each day.

The Greek word “krisis” means “judgment.” The word “krisis” passed into Latin and then into English as the word “crisis.” Judgment can lead to crisis. I found myself living under the judgment of some of those closest to me. The judgment of the world can lead to terrible crisis. Even now, there will be those who judge in their hearts that there must be something wrong with my faith or some unconfessed sins that have led me into depression. Some will be disappointed in me. There is a stigma attached to depression.

I lost confidence. I lost self-esteem. I lost the ability to sleep. I lost the ability to function properly and to face each day and do what needed to be done. I lost all love for myself. I found despair.

I hear some say: “Love for yourself? That’s surely the root of sin. You should not love yourself. As a Christian, you need to deny yourself. You cannot both love yourself and deny yourself at the same time.”

In the journey through this darkness, a dear brother in Christ, a close school friend who had suffered from addictions and had subsequently spent 13 years in a Russian Orthodox monastery where he learnt so much of the mystery of God’s love, taught me about Jesus’ second great commandment[4]—about loving others as we love ourselves. My friend taught me that if we are unable to love ourselves, we cannot love others unconditionally. In the desolate valley that I was in, I had found myself struggling to love others as I used to. I was becoming ineffective, useless in my own eyes, and unfit for the service of Christ Jesus.

What do we learn from pain and loss and from going through a dark, seemingly interminable valley where the judgment of the world glowers down from either side—and we are rendered useless by krisis? I am conscious that many may be frowning, puzzled, since this is outside the experience of their Christian walk. Like me—until it happened—they have never known depression or experienced the debilitating effects of it.

We read: “Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”[5] I have always known that persecution is something we should expect—and in a strange way, even welcome. However, when that persecution goes on for so long, and comes from places that we never thought possible, it can have the effect of wounding us deeply and sending us suddenly spiraling downwards from the mountain top into the valley below.

I had found it increasingly difficult to “rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ.”[6] Rejoice means having joy. With depression, joy evaporated from my being, and I believed that I would never rediscover it.

In small moments of revelation, I am slowly learning that it is a great privilege to participate in the sufferings of Christ—however hard and distressing it seems at the time. Jesus knew suffering, and He also knew complete betrayal, total rejection, and relentless judgment by the world. We, as followers of Jesus, are not immune from a taste of the same after the ravages of debilitating trauma.

As we start to understand Christ’s sufferings more, in a profound way we begin to understand more of His grace and glory. We also learn to understand the suffering of others too—and can draw alongside to empathize and give them our support.

Twenty years ago, I went out to try to deal with the bloody, butchered remains of a friend and fellow Christian, Terry Ford, who was beaten mercilessly and then shot in the head on his farm in 2002. The reason was that President Mugabe’s sister, Sabina Mugabe, wanted his farm. Terry’s faithful old Jack Russell, Squeak, stood over his body, growling at the policemen with their black boots and their guns. The police were not there to protect Terry. Instead, they were there to protect the president’s sister— and her cohorts—from prosecution.

This loss, coupled with and compounded by so much other loss, suffering, and pain over so many years caused many tears. Each murder; each beating; each unjust imprisonment; each farm destruction that I dealt with, coupled with the krisis of judgment, tipped me down the cliff into the valley below. I had read in the Psalms after the murder of Terry that “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”[7]

When depression struck, I concluded that I would never find those songs of joy ever again. My joy had been stolen permanently. Through all the years of pain, I had still experienced joy. It seemed inconceivable that joy should become so remote—and that the darkness could encroach like a suffocating shadow over the valley I was in—and so relentlessly and abominably shut out the light.

How could “songs of joy” burst from my wounded and sorrowful heart once more? It seemed a complete impossibility.

Romanian Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a man who suffered for Christ more than anyone else I have ever met, said that it is not how much we endure that is important. It is how much we love. Without joy, I discovered, it becomes very difficult to love as we should. Our love becomes wooden and dutiful. True joy, which encourages our love for others, can only become deeply genuine when our love for ourselves is rediscovered and our love for God is re-enabled by the power of the Holy Spirit revealing His great love for us.

I have discovered that we get glimpses of that revelation of love in a myriad of different and often unexpected ways. It is those who care enough to come into the valley with us that reveal the most love.

The judgment of the world is cynical and is reflected in the loveless judgment of derision from people who stand looking down the steep valley sides at us. We become despised. Those who sit in judgment bay for our blood in their judgment of us. They long to see our joy stolen, our self-worth destroyed, and our ability to love ourselves and others vanquished further.

The judgment of God is the judgment of love. He loves us in spite of ourselves, in spite of our numerous shortcomings and sin. He knows what it is to be despised, rejected, and in the depths of the most excruciating physical, emotional, and spiritual pain. He knows what it is to have the weight of all our shortcomings and sin upon His own shoulders.

And from that place, that pitiful canyon of a grave of sorrow, that dark place of deep and debilitating depression, that place of rejection and complete loss, I have discovered that He is able to burst us out of the dark “chrysalis” so that, butterfly like, we emerge, because He, Himself, experienced that place of death before us; and He emerged from the grave triumphant, complete, and in glory!

We are told four times in Revelation that we as His Church are the “bride of Christ”—beautiful, radiant, made pure. We will only overcome as “the Bride” in the challenging days ahead—many of which could be very dark—if we can understand these Biblical truths profoundly. “They overcame by the blood of the Lamb, by the Word of their testimony; and they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”[8]

I share this testimony of overcoming in order to breathe fresh courage into you so that together, in the difficult days ahead, we can overcome the dark forces that wish to steal our joy and render us ineffective in loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others. Together, we will “overcome, and as we hope in God, we will renew our strength and soar on wings like eagles and run and not grow weary, and walk and not be faint.[9] I pray this truth for each and every one of us.

——

Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of White Papers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s Global Event.

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