Recently I received a comment from a friend saying that she is often encouraged by my story. This comment has carried me back into my past. A past I rarely think about anymore.
If you could go back in time and meet me five years ago, you wouldn’t recognize me. In fact, you wouldn’t even have gotten the chance to meet me because in the summer of 2021 I didn’t go further than one half mile away from my home. After spending my teenage years in depression and my twenties in suicidal depression, I was spiraling into a complete breakdown. I could hardly talk. I couldn’t drive a vehicle. I couldn’t hold a job. I spent my days battling crippling anxiety as I cried out to the LORD to save me.
There was no one around me who was able to support me in my struggle. When I first got diagnosed with depression a few years before this, the diagnosis was rejected by my father. And I was told that Christian’s should not be depressed. And if they were depressed there was some hidden sin in their lives. Yet there I was, living life as perfectly as I knew how. And I was depressed.
One day in September of 2021, my very wise counselor encouraged me to admit myself to the psychiatric ward of Victoria Hospital. In my counselor’s words I was almost at the point of no return from my mental health breakdown because even in sessions with her I couldn’t talk. In the hospital is where I first found people that listened to my story and acknowledged my pain.
That is where after years of living in severe depression,
I could finally sense the Spirit of God and His love for me in my life again.
The journey in the last five years hasn’t been sunshine exactly. It’s been a long and arduous journey of reframing my beliefs about God, myself, and Christianity. I continued to lose my way throughout the years in different ways. It’s been tough trying to find my way in this world as a single girl without support from my family. And after years of therapy, it’s only in the last few months that I finally feel like I have found mental stability and freedom from my suicidal depression as I have learned to process life in healthy ways.
Today I only recount these memories because I want to say that there is freedom to be had from suicidal depression. I spent hours of my days in the year of 2021 crying out to God, declaring that He was my ONLY HOPE.
And all I can say today is that God answered each of those prayers in very real and tangible ways.
Today I get to live in the reality of those anguished prayers for peace.
The calm I get to experience in myself today is a peace that passes all understanding.
And today instead of spending my waking hours wishing I wasn’t alive, I can spend them purposefully on the calling God has placed on my life.
God is surely in the business of redeeming broken lives.
If He could redeem my story, I know He can redeem yours too. You are not too far gone. You are perfectly loved right where you are at.
*I have never shared the photos of the messages written in the snow with anyone until today because they speak about my nervous system breakdown in 2021 and have been too personal a part of my journey to share.*
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