Hi there!
I trust that you are all feeling suitably inspired because, as always, I am!
Last night, as I usually do on a Monday night, I watched Pastor Steven Furtick talk about relationships in terms of with God and compared it to our relationships with one another. It has, again, changed the way that I look at my Christian faith and, as such, I wanted to take another look at the depressive spirits that often plague so many of us.
As always, I'm not judging anybody because I've been going through some of these very same motions, plus, I'm not going to let this one get too heavy, so don't worry your little selves about that...
De-Press Your Buttons
Instead I'm going to get right into the advice giving stage and tell you that, when your spirits are down, you are to get busy working the ground around you before you become too self-absorbed and too self-focused.
That's what depression is, a spirit that descends upon us and "de-presses" (ED - think of what happens to a button that stays down when you press it, it's been de-pressed, just like that!) us into thinking that we are in a valley when we are not, we are still on a mountain top. Our eyes have simply stopped looking up to Jesus properly for our strength and daily help and started looking at our circumstances instead.
Believe me, I know all about that as I went through a really dark period at the end of 2015 which just so happened to coincide with a certain rejection from a certain person. You know what? Though I didn't handle it in the best manner that I could have, I'm still here today and thanks to those moments when I was down, I realised that Jesus was right here with me, helping me through every step of it.
On Sunday, Pastor Glyn talked about how our words are a self-fulfilling prophecy and that if we are constantly talking negative over our lives then we will continue to reap more of the very same results so you've got to change your focus.
When God gave me the master key to my depression, I then became instantly aware of the sorts of signs I needed to watch out for in myself before my de-pressed spirit became so pushed down that it inverted the very mountain-top experience that I was having. In being able to watch out for those signs I was better able to engineer my environment away from triggering those depressive thoughts.
This was where I finally learned to admit the problems I was having with anxiety to my Life Group, these problems become particularly fierce in a social setting, which is ironic given that I'm part of a church that has over three thousand members!
Luckily, as I called each one of those spirits into the Light, God was able to heal me of the damage that they had done and such that, the scars they have now left me with, I am not ashamed of anymore because Jesus can either heal me of them or use them to great effect in His ministry through me!
You see, it's not about me and it never was!
The sooner we all realise that, the better off we'll be because Jesus said "I have come, that you might have..." in John 10:10 and that is what we are supposed to be living like as well.
Sure, I don't get it right all the time as old thought patterns are still in the ground, but the point is that now that I am aware of them, I can be working the ground around them until such a time comes as they are completely uprooted.
That's the key; working the ground around them because until you are willing to admit that either: -
- You've got a problem; or
- You want to do something about that problem
The longer your ground remains unworked, the more chance it has of freezing over every time that you are disappointed, every time that someone lets you down, or every time that you face a difficulty that seems insurmountable.
Take me, for instance, I once thought my crush was insurmountable, until I realised that God had given me, on Valentine's Day this year no less, all that I needed already to see this through to its culmination.
I'll be telling her soon, you can bet your sweet... salary on that! ;-)
What tickles me though, is that every time we think a situation is insurmountable, God shows up and says "aren't you forgetting about Someone?" forcing you to reassess the way that you have been looking at your situation.
Final Thought
In yesterday's post, I mentioned something from Pastor Levi Lusko of Fresh Life Church where he said that as you look through the eyes of a lion at your circumstances, you start to realise that your present struggle isn't really taking up that much time in the eyes of eternity.
You see, lions have really good eyesight...
No, I mean really good eyesight!
So isn't it time that you started looking at your situation through the eyes of a lion to see what that changes?
Shock, drop & awe!
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