Instantaneous Healing from Depression

I grew up in a highly dysfunctional and occasionally violent family, and had been in deep, black depression for as long as I could remember. I had no close friends. My principal nonacademic activities were taking long, lonely walks very late at night, feeling very sorry for myself while focusing on unrequited love (which I had experienced without interruption since the third grade); and writing melancholy poetry.

I met Jesus in the fall of my junior year of college. Although that was an incomparably powerful, life-transforming experience, I continued to live in the morass of deep depression. One night, a few weeks after I had met Jesus, I was out on my usual late, lonely walk—except that, in the midst of my despondency, I occasionally prayed. For the first time in my life, I “heard” the inaudible but gracious voice of the Father in my head. He said, simply and tenderly, “Would you like to be free from depression?”

Even though I had no previous experience of this kind, I immediately took this to be the voice of God, and instantly responded, “Yes!”

The voice returned with an unexpected question: “Are you sure? Think about it.”

So I pondered the possibility of being free from depression, and to my amazement found the idea to be threatening. Who would I be? My entire identity was bound up in being the lonely, depressed romantic—I had no idea how to be anyone else! Without my depression I would be in a frightening, unknown world. For about half an hour I walked in the darkness of the upscale neighborhoods around the university, beneath large, spreading live oak trees, considering the ramifications of being free from depression. My thoughts were scattered as by a hurricane, my emotions in disarray. But eventually I realized that, no matter what another life might look like and no matter how scary it might be, nothing could be worse than what I’d been living for so many years. So again I said, “Yes!”

Instantly, within about a second, I felt a kind of spiritual whoosh as if a mass of darkness was being sucked out of my very being.

And I was free.

That’s all. The depression was gone, the darkness was gone. I haven’t been depressed a minute since then (except for a couple of hours when I was literally bearing another person’s pain—see Bearing Other People’s Burdens).

God is gracious!