FAITH AND DEPRESSION WAVES

It’s a lovely autumn day today.  Bright silver sunlight paints the trees golden, and white clouds stream across the vivid blue of the sky. It’s quite warm too - at least on one side of my face. I’m lit up from the south west, where the sun is gradually sinking behind the houses.

It’s not lunchtime but I’m having my lunch anyway. I had to drop paperwork off at the solicitors, so I’m just stopping on a bench for a while, taking a moment between all the other moments.

There’s lots going in my head. I get these waves of being horribly depressed by the world, then finding strength to get on with it. It’s the ebb and flow of having faith but also living in the lions’ den: one moment your eye is on the lions, snarling in the corner; the next your heart soars with the hope of God. Then it’s back to the lions, not knowing whether they’re about to pounce. Then God. Lions. God. Lions. God. Fear. Faith. Fear. Faith.

They used to say you couldn’t have one if you had the other.

“Fear,” boomed the televangelist, thumping his gold-edged pulpit, “is the OPPOSITE! The RECIPROCAL! of Holy Ghost Bible Believing FAITH, somebody say a hallelujah.”

He might have been right I suppose. In my experience, there’s always a bit of both. Faith isn’t just believing, it’s doing. And the doing is scary. Buying a house is scary. Getting married, going to uni, starting a new job, telling someone about Jesus, asking someone out for coffee… fear is probably quite normal. If you ask me (and I appreciate you didn’t) faith supersedes fear like aeroplanes supersede the law of gravity. But I don’t know how well that message goes down on TV.

Daniel had a kind of belligerent faith. The reason he was thrown in with the lions in the first place was that he broke the law by praying to God (illegal) with his windows open (optional). Not only did he pray in his rooms, he did so a) loudly and b) through an open window.

I’ll be honest. If a law comes out that prayer in the UK is now illegal, I suspect I’d be praying still, but what I’d definitely be calling ‘wisdom’, would be the voice in my head that tells me to do that silently, internally, and in a locked room. There’s something brilliantly rebellious about Daniel throwing his windows open and praying at full volume.

I don’t quite know what I’ll do about these depression-waves. Some might say it’s half the battle realising that that’s what they are, and that getting out in the Vitamin-D-rich sunshine is a good move. I’d actually quite like it if they didn’t happen, if the world could just switch back to how it used to be, and if everything could be nice and hopeful like it was in the 1990s. But faith is an overcomer isn’t it? It’s a superseder, not a replacer. And even where there’s gravity and darkness and grumbling lions, there is always lift, and light, and the hope of salvation.