Full

These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:11)

For much of my life, I have not known joy. I realize that goes against the current zeitgeist; I grew up white, healthy, and relatively wealthy, compared to the rest of the world. I had good parents who loved me and stayed married, and I went to good schools. I've lived a pretty charmed life.

But into each life some rain must fall, as they say. I was first visited by depression when I was 13, and it's had a hold on me for much of my life ever since. Reading through some of my old journals this weekend, I was reminded of how perpetually unhappy I was throughout my teens, twenties, thirties, and early forties. I was reminded of how truly hopeless and dark everything seemed. I was suicidal for years and spent more than a few weeks in emergency rooms, ICUs, and hospital psych units following overdoses.

Several hundred pages of old journal entries that I found this past weekend.

At times, I felt I could just lie down and die, from sheer lack of will to live.

I honestly don't know how I survived it. I once asked my sister if, when she was young, she'd ever imagined that we'd both have kids and that our kids would be such good friends. She replied that she never thought that I'd live into adulthood; she'd accepted that, at some point, one of my suicide attempts would work. It broke my heart that, as a child, she'd even thought that. But it shows how depressed, how overwhelmed by hopelessness and self-hatred, I'd been.

I try to think of the reasons for my depression, and those reasons are manifold and complex, as are the reasons for anyone's depression, I imagine. There were the hormones, of course; I don't think it's a coincidence that my depression problems started at age 13, or that they've grown less and less as I've approached my menopausal years. I also had issues, I'm sure, related to my deafness and the subsequent difficulties with social life. And as an adoptee, I also dealt with some of the common "abandonment issues" that adoptees experience.

But one of the biggest reasons was my loss of faith--a loss that started when I was in high school and became complete when I was in college. With the loss of faith, I plunged into a much deeper, more destructive depression than any I'd known as a teenager, and it was that darkness that took over my world on a regular basis over the next 25 years. (I never could quite understand happy atheists.)

Somehow, through all those dark years, God never let go of me, and I've somehow found my way back to Him. It is a long story, and I don't mean to make it sound simple and easy here in this blog post; I could honestly write a book. And who knows, maybe I will someday. But in the past few months, I have felt the joy of Christ in me, and it is indeed a fullness, a knowledge that my joy is complete and can never be taken away from me.

What is ironic is that, throughout all of those depression years, I was in good health, physically. I had no aches or pains, and I rarely got sick. Now that I am no longer depressed, and now that I feel spiritually more fulfilled than I ever have, I experience chronic pain in my elbow, my back, my hips, and my knees. My short-term memory is shot, and I have constant headaches from eye strain. And of course there is all of the stress from the Age of COVID, the social unrest, and the increasingly political ugliness among even my friends.

Weirdly, as miserable as all of that makes me feel, I still have this fullness of joy. And I have faith that, no matter how bad things get, I will still have it. And, even though such practices as prayer, meditation, Bible-reading, worship, and fasting help to invite that joy, the presence of it depends less on me than on Him.

It's really amazing and counter-intuitive, this grace thing. I don't deserve this fullness of joy. I deserve the depression, the darkness and the hopelessness. By definition, I don't deserve grace. None of us deserves it.

But he gives it freely to anyone who will accept it, that his joy "may be in you, and that your joy may be full."

Amazing, isn't it? This grace?