Your Depression as Proof of Your Being and Purpose

Love is Blindness by U2 is a song, for me at least, that proves a universal truth. Sad songs drip with truth. They speak to the spirit, opening the door to the soul.

Motion pictures piquing the emotions prove the mind was made to think, the heart evoked to feel. Somehow, we feel more alive when we’ve been taken on a journey.

Then there is that tyrant, Depression. I want to suggest a possibility to ponder.

Depression is a gate into a garden lush with shrubbery for pruning, which is impetus for being and purpose. Being gentle with ourselves, we clip each day the best we can.

I don’t believe there is any journey to being and purpose without conquest, and I believe there’s no conquest without challenge, involving trial, requiring endurance, punctuated by pain.

Pain’s opportunity is endurance,
the way through trial,
the only way to conquest.

Whether you’re depressed for a day or suffering from clinical depression, I pray you might be richly encouraged and convinced in your inner being. Your search for being has great purpose. Your pain has vast meaning. In your gleaning is gold, but the search is a testing one, as you well know.

Please, think about it this way:

Our world, C.G. Jung (1875–1961) would say, has forgotten the individual. Everything is about numbers and mass; organisations, programs, converts, return-on-investment — as if God designed greedy growth as the purpose of life. When we’re depressed we’re swallowed by the idea that we’re unimportant, insignificant, incapable. We believe the world’s lies.

Indigenous communities of the world knew their strength lay in dignifying the individual. These communities worked so well because they knew how much communing in unity relies on respecting the individual. They respected God’s creational norms, and they did so because they focused on cooperation, which elicits safety, and not on competition like today’s world does, which rips wellbeing apart. These indigenous values have all been as much as completely lost in this perverse age.

But don’t forget, God wrote the Book of Life, and He says your being and purpose matters as much as anyone else’s, ever — past, present or future. The truth is about to be revealed to you in eternity, but you don’t have to wait that long to discover it.

The world may have you believing your shreds of worth are insufficient for being and purpose, but that just isn’t true.

Your very passage through depression is poignant. Allow it not to kill you, but to refine you, as you reach feebly forward to God. Find His unconditional acceptance in your unconditional surrender; a profound sense of being and purpose for life.

To this manner of being, find your purpose centrally there. It’s there to be found by you.

The depth in your depression is proof of your search for being and purpose. When we believe such a search has a destination, we’re prepared to embark on that journey.