Melancholy

Melancholy is the road less traveled; joy we feel and embrace, depression is suffocating, melancholy is just blah. It is living in a world of knee-deep mud while trying to move forward. Melancholy, you are not in; you are not out; you are just stuck.

Proverbs 17:22, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”

Follow me on a somewhat circuitous journey for a minute. I remember when I was 30 and received my first pacemaker. I dropped into a period of melancholy thinking because I was living via an artificial device (i.e., I was no longer invincible). A few weeks ago, I received an artificial value in my heart. Everything went better than planned, and I started hiking again within weeks. But my friend Melancholy reappeared. A friend of mine. who is a nurse, told me that they were taught that melancholy was a normal reaction to heart surgery.

I remember this quote; “it is not the water around the boat that sinks it; it is the water that gets into the boat that sinks it” So intellectually and physically, all is good, but emotionally I have doubts. I started letting the water outside the boat seep in; I was taking on water. In the book “Not Good Enough, Why Your Small God Leads to Big Problems” by JD Greear, he states, “When we say “I can’t believe in God because there is so much purposeless evil in the world,” we assume that we could immediately perceive whatever purpose is out there.”

Here is where I try to draw this together; I started to let the fact that I could not see God’s hand in some of the dysfunction around me, that I started to assume His hand was not there. Somehow, intellectually I understood; emotionally, I was letting go. I started to lose hope because I did not understand the bigger plan. Therefore, my role in the plan got foggy. My purpose became fragmented. I started to question why. Asking why is not a bad thing; not accepting the answer is.

We all go through periods of darkness. We live in a fallen world. Some of those dark periods have a purpose; some are purposeless SIGSWs (self-inflicted gun shoot wounds). My melancholy is self-inflicted, it has no real purpose, but I have experienced the other type too; they are much harder to climb out of. We rationalize our position without the benefit of a contrary opinion. Because we do not understand, we stop listening.

Ecclesiastes 8:17, “Then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.”

When we are in the throes of pain, it is difficult to feel God’s wisdom and love. Pain does not have to be physical. The worse pain I have felt in my life was emotional. I understand how the body heals, I don’t understand how the heart heals, but it does, not with antiseptic, bandages, and stitches, but with love and caring. Giving what we desperately need provides us with what we want.

1 Corinthians 2:9, “However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived are the things God has prepared for those who love him.”

This post is short. More cathartic than informative. I’m patching the holes one by one that are letting water in. I am trying not to let dysfunction hijack my emotions. I am trying to focus on God’s plan for everyone, not just me. Most important, I am trying to learn what God wants me to know from this experience.

Romans 15:13, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”