Falling on His Grace

A friend of mine had several ladies over to her house last Wednesday evening. It was a very enjoyable time. While there, I caught the tail-end of a conversation about Prozac and other antidepressants, as a group, being the most-prescribed type of medication in the U.S. Having chronic depression myself, I have often wondered why depression and anxiety are so common in our society and have been thinking about that again since Wednesday. While there may be a link between a chemical deficiency in the brain and depression or anxiety, I have a difficult time believing that is the primary reason for such a large number of cases of depression and anxiety, and I wonder if a chemical deficiency may be often caused by the stressors our society daily subjects us to. Just in brainstorming on this topic, here are some of my thoughts as to what contributes to the large numbers of people with depression: 1) Lack of faith in God. This is a theme that will come up in many of my arguments. As a so...

Giving it to God: How My Complete Surrender Gave Me the Freedom I Yearned For “Kim, you have to get home.” I had just come out of my counselor’s office and was sitting in my car, praying, when my phone rang. “Why? What’s going on?” I was concerned. The serious tone in my husband’s voice was obvious. “Everything’s caving in,” he explained. Both of us had been feeling depressed, crushed by the ins and outs of daily life, tired of the rush and hurry of our lives and the get-ahead mentality. Like many people, we needed to slow down. We were both working and raising two boys, ages 4 months and 20 months, and I was suffering with postpartum depression. City life was not for Andy, my husband of nearly three years, and he believed it wasn’t good for me either, that I would also feel better in a slower, less hurried environment. I rushed home. “We need to get out of here,” he said as I walked into the living room where he was ...

While I am not a writer or a theologian by training, I am a writer in that I love to write and rarely feel more alive than when I do write. And I am a theologian in that I love to study about God and to pray. I am one of those crazy people that learn the most through writing, especially when that writing is done in prayer and contemplation. And I feel that God has placed the desire to learn about Him and the desire to write on my heart. I hope that He will bless my efforts to praise Him through the use of the gifts He has given me and that He will help me to develop those gifts through their continued use so that I am able to give Him all the more glory. I am also not a counselor or a psychologist, but I do have some first hand knowledge of depression and anxiety and have learned much about both through experience. I have learned that depression and anxiety can be seen as an opportunity to fall on the grace of God, to learn to trust Him, and to allow ourselves to be drawn closer t...