This morning I was reminded of a conversation I recently had with a friend. She couldn't fathom how a true Christian could get depressed when all they needed was Jesus. I understand her argument that God should be enough no matter what the situation. Living as if that is absolute truth is more difficult than it is to let those words fall from your lips. In fact, I have come up against many Christians who don't believe depression should ever be an ailment of other Christians. So NOT true!
Thinking through that this morning, I had the little voice inside me reminding me that there are real reasons for the way I feel. Becoming a Christian only made things like Christmas more difficult. Becoming a Christian meant I had to look at everything in truth and stop hiding in the dark. Christmas time is one of those things that had to be kept in the dark, so that it didn't threaten to bring me down like it is doing now.
I know I've mentioned a little bit in the past about what Christmas was like for me as a child and to summarize, it was never good. It was always a time of pain, physically and emotionally.
Someone asked me the other day if there were things from my childhood that I remembered about Christmas that were good. Yes, but no was my answer.
I went several years with some extended family to the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass at their church. I absolutely loved the warm, decorated church. My favorite part was the music. It was my chance to sing the Christmas music that I knew from school. Obviously this was back in the day when it was still ok in a small town school to sing about Christ.
It was still impossible to hold onto that joy for longer than the 60 minute service. The priest was the one who had witnessed my cousin molesting me and failed to stop it. The other downside was that the same cousin would always find a way to molest me shortly after arriving home from the service.
Somewhere along the way, I received a gift of a snow globe. In the glittery snow sat a manger scene and it played O' Little Town of Bethlehem. At the time, it was just a song I knew and knew I liked. The manger scene inside wasn't about baby Jesus at all. To me, this was a very real picture of a mother and father who loved their baby so much that they could do nothing more than stare intently. Because of the song, I knew it was somehow associated with Christmas.
Whether my heart was broken or I had been beaten and assaulted on one my dad's rampages, I could look into my snow globe and see what it would be like if my parents had loved me. My dad tried many times to take that snow globe away from me, causing me to learn to hide it well. I used to think he didn't want me to think parents were supposed to care like that. However, now I think it represented a God that he hates.
The last time I saw the snow globe was one night over Christmas break as a teen when I had been savagely beaten and raped. I desperately stared at the baby, wishing to be in the presence of two parents who loved me. Without any warning and in the blink of an eye, my dad grabbed the snow globe from my hands. He took it to the front steps and smashed it onto the sidewalk.
It's not an exaggeration to say I was devastated. It's also not a stretch to understand how the constant evil in my life could possibly be wreaking havoc with me today.
It's easy when you aren't a Christian to keep everything in the dark pit, locked up and unexposed. But being a Christian has forced me to crawl in that pit and expose myself to what is really true. I know that the end goal is to emerge from the pit, living with a new truth...exposed and unashamed of what was, looking forward to what is and will forever be.
Until that day, it's a constant fight in that pit. I believe it's a battle, a spiritual battle. Either give up and walk away from the truth or stay in the pit and fight it out until I can get out. Do what's easy or do what's hard. It's getting harder to do the hard thing. I said it last night and I'm learning it's more true everyday. I cannot do this by myself. By myself, I will lose the battle.
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