A great read by Pastor Tchividjian: Where to Look When You’re in Trouble Here is just a snippet to encourage you to click through and read the entire post:   “When you’re on the brink of despair–looking into the abyss of darkness, experiencing a dark-night of the soul–turning to the internal quality of your faith will bring you no hope, no rescue, no relief. Every internal answer will collapse underneath you. Turning to the external object of your faith, namely Christ and his finished work on your behalf, is the only place to find peace, re-orientation, and help. The gospel always directs you to something, Someone, outside you instead of…

Today my wonderful sister reminded me of an important truth … When someone is struggling with depression or any other major life challenge, it is not a good time to be making large-scale evaluations of anything. For me, specifically, this means that I really need to put a halt to my (despairing) self-evaluations as to the state of my marriage, parenting, service at church, relationships, etc. Why? Because I’m not really thinking straight right now. The (physical, spiritual, emotional) crises of the moment are fairly all-encompassing and I simply don’t have what it takes to grade my own report card as it were. So. This is a good day to…

Knowing how much I appreciate Ed Welch’s, Blame it on the Brain: Distinguishing Chemical Imbalances, Brain Disorders, and Disobedience, a woman in my church recommended that I get a hold of Dr. Welch’s first book on this topic, Counselor’s Guide to the Brain and Its Disorders: Knowing the Difference between Disease and Sin. I’m glad to have both of them, but I must admit, the 1991 publication date makes me long for a new book on this topic from CCEF (the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation)—the study of the brain has had many changes (advancements?) in the last twenty years. Maybe they’ll be publishing something in time for their big conference this…

Just like Churchill’s “black dog,” my heart sometimes struggles with “dark thoughts” that would rightly be described, I’m sure, as “depression” or “spiritual depression.” I won’t beleaguer this post with lots of specifics, but I will let you all know that last night even I realized that my thoughts were spiraling into “the bad place.” And I did reach out for help—and I’m receiving help. Lots of tears. Baby steps of real life progress. But this morning I woke up without a crushing pressure on my chest, so that’s a real grace! I also wanted to be sure to let you all know how much I appreciate the kind emails…