More Than You Can Handle?

There's a dangerous illness afflicting women everywhere across the nation. It's linked to considerable physical and mental suffering. It disrupts millions of lives, decreasing productivity and contributing to marital stress, absenteeism, loss of income, and disability. It is Depression.

Depression may not be as obvious as a broken leg, but it's just as real and just as painful. It's a complicated "whole body" illness that affects the way you eat, sleep, think, behave, and feel. It's a very treatable condition, so there is no need to suffer with it. Unfortunately, within the Christian community, there are four common misconceptions about this illness, which make it difficult for many to seek the help they need. These myths are:

1) God doesn't give us more hardship than we can handle.

2) Good Christians don't get depressed.

3) Depression is sin.

4) We're useless when we're depressed.

Many well meaning people tell the depressed person that God doesn't give you more than you can handle, so He must think you can bear whatever He has dumped in your lap. People who think this way claim that this idea is taught in 1 Corinthians 10:13. What this verse actually says is that you will not have any temptation that isn't common to men, and that God will not allow you to encounter any temptation to sin without also providing a way for you to avoid that temptation. In other words, God won't let you be tempted when there is no way you can resist sinning.

Does God allow his people to be burdened beyond what they're able to bear? Paul wrote these very words in his second letter to the Corinthian church. He said, "We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life." (1 Corinthians 1:9)Paul's difficulties were too much for him. If God doesn't give more than a person can bear, He certainly would not have excessively overburdened the apostle Paul, would He?

Paul was suicidal and no longer wanted to live. That's about as depressed as you can get, so how can anyone say that Christians don't or shouldn't get depressed? Paul was a leader of the Christian church. If he got depressed, can we expect to be immune to Depression? But don't despair about that, because Paul wrote, "But He (God) delivered us and He will deliver us." Even if the situation ends in death, God delivers His people. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 4:16-22, "The Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed . . . and I was delivered from the lion's mouth. The Lord will rescue me . . . and will bring me safely to His heavenly kingdom." God helps us through tough times IF we allow Him to handle things and give Him room to work. Paul said "When I am weak, then I am strong." (2 Corinthians 12:10)

Some of God's greatest leaders suffered from Depression. There was the prophet Elijah. In 1 Kings 19:4, it says, "He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. 'I have had enough, LORD,' he said,' Take my life.'"

David, the "man after God's own heart," got depressed. The book of Psalms is filled with expressions of his Depression. He wrote, "I am laid low in the dust." (Psalm 119:25) "I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long. I groan because of the turmoil of my heart."(Psalm 38:6,8 - NKJV) In Psalm 6:3 he says, "my soul is in anguish." Verses 6 and 7 say, "I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow."

King Soloman wrote in Proverbs 18:14, "The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness, But who can bear a broken spirit?"

Others in the Bible who may have experienced Depression include Job, Jonah, and Jeremiah (called "the weeping prophet").

Nowhere does the Bible call depression sin. 2 Corinthians 7:6 says God comforts the depressed; He doesn't condemn them. Depression