Remember how I wrote a post at the beginning of the year, about how I am seeking to know God better? This is one of several-to-come update posts relating to that. It's not that I'm on some new level. But I've been feeling some small changes, and making some conscious efforts. I think they're worth sharing, or even just recording for myself as a check-up from the time I initially felt that I needed to work on my relationship with God.
First, lately I have felt more deeply in my soul this fact about God: God is The Giver. "Our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, are the ultimate Givers", and I would include Mother in that, too. The scriptures tell us, "If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?" However, sometimes it goes a step further. Recently, I have been astonished that when I ask for bread, I instead receive cake.
[Not always, of course. As Elder Renlund warned us in his last Conference address, it's important to not come to God with a sense of entitlement. That's something I fight off, a lot, unfortunately. It becomes a cycle of: expecting everything, not receiving everything, falling down and expecting nothing, and then being surprised when I receive everything. . . then all too often, going back to expecting everything. I suppose it's just my own new labels slapped on the Pride Cycle, right?]
It's terrible-but-my-own-fault, that it takes moments of fearful uncertainty or trial to bring me to the kind of desperation that makes me rely on God again. Recently, I have actually experienced it in reverse - where I at FIRST felt confident as I pressed forward, sure that God would take care of me. Then every few steps, I would discover the terror of empty air beneath my feet. AND YET. Each time I hit a firm foothold after falling but a few feet. So was I ever left to the empty air at all? No, just enough to get freaked out! and call out for rescue. Which I thought I was dodging, by trying to forge my way forward in action as best as I could in the first place! I guess I have a long way to go on that concept.
Anyway . . . I have asked the Lord for some certain things in my life, and he has given me and my family good gifts such as we had not expected. I look at where I was even two months ago and am shocked at where we are now. From totally broke to buying our first house, for one. Other ones too private to share. Nothing has been perfectly easy, but everything has come to us tenfold for our prayers and efforts.
Second. I have also come to a realization - one that is now so obvious to me that I feel stupid that it wasn't clear to me before. I have realized that my depression is warping my view of EVERYTHING in my life, including (this is the part I really hadn't accepted yet) my sense of God and my own spirituality. And it's like, well DUH! But I think it snuck in on the edges so gradually that I didn't notice it. It is to the point that I have proclaimed that God doesn't care about me while literally simultaneously experiencing the physical blessings of promptings I'd been given and responded to. Psycho, but real. Because my body's chemicals tell me that I'm sitting in the dark even as I sit in the light. I think I pretended there was a neat line dividing the emotional and the spiritual, and there's not. In fact, even as I write this, I don't yet believe my own self yet. It takes only a bad nights' sleep and a lack of recharge time to throw me RIGHT back into my dark views on self, God, church, marriage, world, you name it. It's still a struggle. But at least now I can name and see the beast I'm fighting.
Depression is blocking me from feeling like I'm on track with the Lord. I feel like there's an emptiness, a lack of connection. I feel that my relationship with God holds no joy and therefore how can it hold worth and meaning? I tell myself that it's my conscience or the Holy Ghost chastening me to do better, be better. I go through ridiculous amounts of guilt. All the prayer, scriptures, counseling, etc., still leaves me feeling dead spiritually. But in the end there is nothing spiritually happening to make me feel this empty. However, there is stuff chemically happening to make me feel empty.
Anyway, dumb that it's only in the past several months that I've really realized all of this. And so now I have to tell myself the things I feel are just not true. It's one thing that I've let my anxiety and depression be part of hating on myself . It's another dangerous level that I let my anxiety and depression convince me to do the same thing with God, and my family.
I'm not exactly sure what the solution is, both with regard to rebuilding my connections to God and other people, and with regard to getting a better grip on my depression and anxiety. But like I said before, at least now I can recognize what I'm dealing with. It's a place to start. And I think coming to that realization was another gift from The Giver, too. :)
"O then, if I have seen so great things, if the Lord in his condescension unto the children of men hath visited men in so much mercy, why should my heart weep and my soul linger in the valley of sorrow, and my flesh waste away, and my strength slacken, because of mine afflictions? And why should I yield to sin, because of my flesh? Yea, why should I give way to temptations, that the evil one have place in my heart to destroy my peace and afflict my soul? Why am I angry because of mine enemy? Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin. Rejoice, O my heart, and give place no more for the enemy of my soul."
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