Pared To Truth

The Bruised Reed in the Dark, Part 4: What Remains When Strength Fails

I ended the last part by saying that depression, like any severe trial, is often God’s holy ground.

Not because depression itself is holy. There is nothing sacred about a mind becoming ill or a human being suffering beneath a weight he can scarcely bear. But in the providence of God, severe affliction often becomes a place of unusual instruction.

Job puts it strikingly:

“He delivers the poor in their affliction,
And opens their ears in oppression.”
— Job 36:15

The Psalmist says much the same:

“Before I was afflicted I went astray,
But now I keep Your word.”
— Psalm 119:67

And again:

“It is good for me that I have been afflicted,
That I may learn Your statutes.”
— Psalm 119:71

God opens ears in oppression.

That does not mean that He begins whispering new revelations into our minds. The Bible teaches that God revealed Himself through the prophets, finally and supremely in Christ and through His apostles, and that this revelation has been preserved for us in Scripture. Christians therefore do not search private voices or inward impressions for new messages from God.

We have the Word.

But we do not always understand the weight of what we already know.

And in His providence God sometimes arranges our circumstances—including our most painful ones—so that truths known for years begin to penetrate places they had never reached before.

That should not surprise us, because something similar happens at the merely human level.

A man who believes he may be dying rarely continues assigning the same importance to everything he cared about the week before. Severe illness, bereavement, war, disaster, even a frightening medical diagnosis can rearrange the furniture of the mind almost overnight. The trivial does not necessarily disappear, but it becomes visibly trivial.

In other words, pain distills.

Ordinary life permits us to postpone the largest questions almost indefinitely. There is work to do, money to earn, children to raise, places to go, screens to watch, arguments to win. Much of this is perfectly legitimate creaturely life. Yet the sheer abundance of the immediate can keep the ultimate comfortably out of view.

Affliction interrupts that arrangement.

It teaches mortality not as a proposition but as an atmosphere.

Perhaps this is part of what Scripture means by ears being opened in oppression. Suffering does not necessarily make a person wiser, and depression certainly does not turn every thought into insight.

But pain can make us attentive.

And the strange thing is that what it teaches is not always disabling.

Modern culture often assumes that serious mental anguish must leave behind only damage—a deficit to be managed, concealed, or overcome before a person can again be considered fully capable. But history gives us good reason to treat the subject with less simplicity.

It offers more than one striking example, but Abraham Lincoln is among the most remarkable.

Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness examines the abundant historical testimony concerning Lincoln’s lifelong melancholy and his severe depressive collapses as a young man. Lincoln’s melancholy was hardly a secret invented by modern psychiatry; it was widely remarked upon by those who knew him and was familiar terrain to early students of his life.

Yet this did not prevent him from pursuing political office, eventually assuming the presidency at the moment of arguably the greatest constitutional crisis in American history.

Shenk goes further. His argument is not merely that Lincoln succeeded despite depression. He proposes that some of the habits developed through years of wrestling with melancholy—persistence, reflection, humor, emotional discipline, and an unusual familiarity with suffering—became resources in his leadership. Reviewers have summarized Shenk’s case as one in which Lincoln’s depression deepened his empathy and helped forge the self-discipline he carried into the presidency.

One need not accept every psychological inference Shenk makes to recognize the larger point.

Mental anguish does not necessarily render a human being less capable of serious work, responsibility, courage, or greatness.

Sometimes the person who has passed through prolonged darkness emerges carrying something he could hardly have acquired in easier circumstances.

Those who have endured their own melancholies will often recognize this, even if they would never wish the experience upon anyone.

Months in which nearly everything appears vain can leave behind a peculiar sobriety.

The result is not necessarily optimism. Sometimes almost the opposite. A man may become less impressed by promises that everything will work out nicely. He has learned too much for that. But he may also become harder to frighten with ordinary adversity.

He has already lived where the walls closed in around him.

He has watched hope disappear and later discovered that hopelessness was not omniscient.

He has learned that even the darkest convictions of the mind, however final they may feel, can pass.

He may therefore meet later suffering with something quieter than confidence and stronger than cheerfulness: a kind of resigned steadiness.

Not resignation in the sense of surrender, but in the older Christian sense of yielding ourselves to providence.

The world is no longer required to be pleasant before duty can be done.

That kind of resolve is expensive.

It cannot be manufactured by motivational slogans, and I doubt anyone who possesses it would say the price was cheap.

But it is real.

For the Christian, however, suffering reaches deeper still.

Once pain has reduced life to its essentials, eventually the question of our standing before God comes into view.

And mortality can make theology personal with an urgency seven seminary degrees could not impress upon us.

Because it is one thing to confess that all men die. It is another to suspect that I may die. Similarly, it is rather easy to confess that all have sinned. It is altogether different to begin contemplating our own sins while lying awake in the dark.

It is often affliction that softens the bulwarks we erect in prosperity to keep such contemplations out of mind.

We are experts in comparing ourselves horizontally because we find the exercise highly reassuring. After all, we worked hard, loved our families, were not as dishonest as one man, as cruel as another, or as selfish as someone else. We did good, and though we may confess to some shortcomings—we would hardly call them evil—we generally suppose that the scales of God will balance favorably enough.

But the question the Bible foremost forces us to reckon with has never been whether we compare reasonably well with other men.

It is what becomes of us before a holy God.

Here depression may become especially brutal because it often produces an exaggerated consciousness of guilt. Real sins return alongside imagined ones. Old failures take on enormous proportions. Forgiven offenses may be dragged back into court as though Christ had never died. The diseased mind becomes prosecutor, witness, and judge (and, but for the grace of God, executioner).

Yet precisely here Scripture speaks with an authority our fickle conscience does not possess.

The gospel never teaches that we become acceptable to God by accumulating a respectable moral record.

Its message is precisely for people whose record cannot bear that weight—for those who find themselves imprisoned by their conscience and their sins.

And there can be enormous freedom in finally discovering this—not merely as doctrine, but as necessity.

We spend much of our lives establishing ourselves: useful, competent, responsible, decent, strong, successful—perhaps even spiritually mature.

Affliction can demolish those credentials with astonishing efficiency few other things can match.

The disciplined man discovers that he cannot command his own mind into peace. The intelligent man cannot reason himself into hope. The strong man cannot simply decide to become strong again. Even the experienced Christian may discover that truths he has so often offered confidently to others seem suddenly without effect in his own soul, sometimes for months.

What remains when all of that collapses is what the Bible says must remain from the beginning.

Christ.

Because grace sounds different when strength has failed. Forgiveness sounds different when our own conscience has turned against us. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” sounds different when the mind has spent months constructing condemnations of its own.

And the promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ acquires another weight when we have spent months groping for a sense of His presence—the very Source of life.

Again, none of this means that a depressed person must discover some grand spiritual lesson while he is ill.

Biblical doctrine of providence does not promise that we will eventually decipher every sorrow. It says something both more modest and more profound: sorrow itself has never escaped the government of God.

Disease remains disease.

Darkness remains darkness.

Loss remains loss.

But none of them is sovereign.

And that may be one of the deepest things a Christian can learn after passing through severe depression.

The illness may have taken months or years. It may have damaged relationships, interrupted work, altered plans, and left behind memories one would gladly erase. The Bible does not require us to call those losses imaginary, joyful, or good.

It tells us that they do not possess the final say as to what becomes of us.

Sometimes the man who entered the darkness and the man who eventually emerged from it are recognizably still the same person, yet something fundamental has changed. Among those inward changes, none is more precious than the deeper awareness that whatever strength remains was never entirely his own.

The darkness was not holy.
But God was there.
That is why the ground may be.