By Tom Barker
Have I mentioned my intense dislike
of blawging before? I can’t help but
feel pretentious, even if it isn’t pretentious.
Why should you, my dear reader, care about my thoughts and
feelings? I have no right to demand
this, yet, that is what this platform feels like to me, even though it isn’t. I guess I’ll tell myself it’s my job, and
then this isn’t my fault. I will assume
that if you are reading this, then you care and if you care, then I appreciate
your kindness. Thus I will reward your
kindness with vulnerability. (Because I love you.)
About a year ago,
I was diagnosed with mild, but chronic depression. It was unsettling, but pretty obvious once I
thought about it. My experience has been
a consistently negative thought pattern about myself and life. I constantly beat myself down and try to
convince myself to believe the worst of others, with frequent success. A month ago, after a particularly frustrating
day, it finally dawned on me: depression is an addiction. Self-hatred is self-pity, self-pity is self-hatred. It’s comforting to feel like a victim. It takes responsibility away from you. Feeling like other people don’t care because
I don’t give them a chance make me feel powerful because through this I can lie
to myself that I’m better than them.
Self-pity is pride.
And yet, God didn’t
create us this way. God isn’t looking
down on us, as we wallow is self-pity, saying “why don’t you just get better?” Instead, I think He says, “I didn’t create
you to be this way, I’m sorry that you experience this.” As an important aside, I would never say that
people’s hurts and pains are entirely manufactured, your problems do matter and
deserve to be heard and listened to. I’m
asking: how do we encourage and validate people, while helping them see that
their self-pity is the sin that is keeping them depressed?
This last week I
began to feel angry, detached and somewhat discouraged again. I was too prideful/afraid to talk about
it. As we have established, I don’t like
imposing my problems on other people, even if they want to hear them. But, it is dawning on me that dilemma represents both the
problem and solution. If I can say this
without throwing up, Love is what binds and frees us. A self-centered “what can I get” love is what
makes us crinkle inward like wrapping paper.
(It isn’t even love at that point, its greed). A surrendering, sacrificial love enables us to
reach out. As Dodd “takes the cake”
Drake, Jack Cody and Jean Vainer (that’s three reputable sources, so you
better listen) often say, we have to sit down and let God love us. Without that example as our source we can
never be free. We can never open like a flower
and receive the genuine love of others. But
to do that you have to beat pride, to beat pride, you have to beat apathy, and to
beat apathy; you must unlock purpose and all you have to do to unlock purpose
is to exist.
Take Luck.
Take Luck.
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