Hi! I’m Joni Eareckson Tada with a word if you’re feeling the Christmas blues.
Yep, it does happen to the most stalwart of saints. Christmas suddenly arrives and you feel like you’re scrambling to keep up. The joy of the season seems to have passed you by and here you are struggling with the blues. My friend, Anna, is dealing with this right now. Nothing awful has happened: no death in the family, no illness or injury—Anna is just feeling depressed. The good thing about her is though, she shared that she wants to get up and out of depression. C’mon, it’s Christmas. She wants to embrace all the wonderful reasons to celebrate this season.
When Anna and I spent some time together, we discussed how when you’re depressed, you’re just not very motivated. You don’t feel anything, or if you do, you feel like disappearing or avoiding life. And Anna is a pretty feeling-driven person. So as we talked about her feelings, I pretty much told her that she will have to learn another way to live. Because when you are depressed, the new way of living is to believe and act on what God says rather than feel what God says. To paraphrase Hebrews chapter 11, faith is being certain of “what we do not feel”. In other words, when there is a debate between what your feelings are saying and what Scripture is saying, guess what—Scripture always wins. Any other option and you are essentially telling God that He cannot be trusted. Like thinking, God is not telling the truth or, this principle works for others but not me, or I can’t trust Him; I can only trust myself. You might want to say that you don’t understand what God is doing, but to deny that God speaks the truth is just not right. It’s what your adversary, the devil, would want you to believe. The fact is, God is truth and so is His Word.
Anna was intrigued by this, but she told me that she was still struggling to find purpose in her life. She “feels” as if she has no purpose, and therefore no hope. For her, there’s no reason to get out of bed, to go to work or love or live. I shared with her that God counters those feelings of hers on almost every page of Scripture. For example, I Peter chapter 1 tells us to “love one another deeply, from the heart”. That, right there, is a purpose statement. It’s a reason for Anna to get out of bed. She has to fight her paralyzing feelings so that she can reach out to others and actually care about them and love them and help them! Why bother? Because it is Anna’s personal commission from Jesus Christ, the King of kings. It is His specific command for her. If she is God's servant—and she is—and He asks her to do something, she has just been given a purpose for living. What is neat is, Anna liked this idea—thankfully, like I said, Anna wants to live beyond her feelings. She wants to change. And so starting this week, she is getting out of bed and looking for people she can help or serve or encourage or uplift. And wonderful things happen to your heart and your head when you focus on God and others.
Let me share that Anna was very much helped by a booklet called “Depression: The Way Up When You’re Down” by Dr. Edward Welch. And I would love to send you a copy, too—just visit my radio page today at joniandfriends.org and while you’re there, be sure to share a prayer request. If you, like Anna, are feeling down and wanting to find the way up, we want to pray for you. Also, while you’re visiting my radio page, I’ve posted a special Christmas message on video I’d like you to see. So when you have a chance, drop by joniandfriends.org.
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P.O. Box 3333, Agoura Hills, CA 91376