To the Dearest Sufferer of the Greatest God,

“But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.”- 1 Kings 19:4 (ESV)

The state of depression is one that all know, many have seen, some have traveled, and few have resided. At first consideration of the text in 1 Kings many of our initial reactions would be, “Man! This guy is not in good shape!”, which would then be followed by feelings of sympathy or perhaps, the lack thereof. However, there is also a select group of people who can read this statement and know EXACTLY where the writer’s heart is, surrounded by depths of darkness. If that is you today, if you can read this text and say, “I know where he’s at, because I’m in the same place,” please, read every word of this and do so knowing that you are not alone, you are loved beyond all measure and there is HOPE for you. 

I believe it would shock the outsider to know that the man who said these words was the one of the most influential heroes of the faith, not only to the Jewish people, but also the gentile who would come to Christ. Anyone who knows much at all of the Bible, also knows how great a prophet Elijah was. In fact, he is one of the two men who have not yet tasted death because they walked with God from here in this earthly realm into glory! So, in knowing this fact about Elijah, my prayer is that a specific truth is planted into our minds: When people experience Elijah’s kind of reaction to deep, immense, and dark suffering, they are NOT necessarily without God, alone or abandoned by God. Rather, being in this state brings the opposite of separation from God; in fact, depression brings a closeness like no other state of being. I hope to further illustrate this through giving my personal testimony as to how God restored me out of the deepest and darkest holes of depression.

Growing up in small town Russellville, Kentucky, I did not have many stresses nor ailments. I was raised by two parents who exalted Christ in everything they did, whether it was serving in the church, their workplaces, or our home. Their priority for my brothers and I was to know Christ and love Him. However, despite being blessed with such an upbringing, I always seemed to wrestle with my own mind. While going through elementary school, I suffered with extreme anxiety which made talking in front of people practically impossible for me, and I would experience what I would come to know later on in life as depression. As I grew a little older and got into playing sports in my middle school years, my anxiety decreased drastically and my confidence soared like any pre-teen kids’ do when they find something they’re decent at. Near the end of my middle school years, in 7th grade, I recognized the reality of my sinful soul’s state, placed my faith in and was saved by Christ Jesus. A short time afterwards, I felt a strange movement toward preaching. 

Now, as I mentioned before, throughout my whole life (to this point) my biggest fear was having to speak to or even be seen by a multitude of people. Therefore, I can attribute this sudden desire and courage only to the Lord. There was not one iota of Luke Brown in his nature that could muster up the courage to take on the task of answering the calling into ministry. But through the Lord’s gracious act, He chose to call me at the age of 12 years old.

A couple months into my ministry, I knew very little about what this “calling” entailed. I had already started building the reputation as “the preacher boy”, which made me an outcast when compared to the average middle school teenager even though my calling was received well by the majority of my peers given (The majority of us kids grew up in Christian homes that attended Baptist churches.). However, there was one kid who stood out differently when it came to religious beliefs. This classmate of mine was a self-proclaimed Atheist. For a small-town in southern Kentucky, openly expressed atheism presents a rare scenario! Whenever he first told our classmates this, one would have thought he challenged me to a duel in front of all the kids. Each one of my friends that was within hearing distance of this came up to me saying, “you gotta talk to him and prove him wrong since you preach the Bible!” At that moment, I felt I had only two choices– one, listen to them, act out of egotistical motivation, and make a fool out of myself as well as possibly saying something wrong and tarnishing the Chirstian faith; OR two, examine the reality of the situation that I am a 12 year old kid knowing very little about what he was actually preaching and therefore start preparing for the right time to have a Gospel conversation with my friend. I chose the latter.

As time went on into 8th grade, I prepared more and more by studying the Scriptures and occasionally preaching behind the pulpit. Along with the building of my preparedness came more opportunities for Gospel conversations with the “atheist”, which due to us being in different classes, was always at lunchtime. I can remember every day, walking out of the lunch line at my elementary school looking to my left and seeing all my friends sitting together laughing, talking about what naïev middle school kids talk about and then looking to my right and seeing my classmate sitting by himself. He was often bullied for certain things –never about his atheism– about how he looked and how he did different things. We were very much alike in a sense, we were both outcast. Daily seeing both scenes provoked an internal battle, Comfort vs. Conviction. I could choose the comfort of being with my friends and avoiding awkward conversations that could lead to failure, hoping that maybe the next day I would decide to step up OR I could choose to be courageous in my faith, fulfill what I was called to do and speak the Gospel into my classmates’ life. Over and over, I chose the latter.

“I’ll do it  tomorrow… I’ll do it next week.” are two phrases that when it comes to sharing the Gospel, I never say anymore because a few months after going through this cycle, my classmate began not coming to school. At first he would miss a few days at a time; he transitioned into weeks at a time, which then led to months of absences. We would come to learn about the reason he was absent for so long… Leukemia in the brain. Through the course of 2-3 months, we would get updates on how he was doing. Sometimes it would be reports of improvement, other times it would be reports of struggle. However, the time would come on December 2, 2016, when my mother broke the news to me that my classmate lost his battle to cancer.

To this day, I have never felt such a feeling of regret. Every single missed opportunity, every conversation that I could have had, rushed to my mind and crashed into my heart, breaking it in two. At his funeral, I came face to face with two somewhat paradoxical responses, total surrender and dogged determination. The first came in the midst of my grief and guilt: I learned that to answer the call to ministry means to surrender your life to it (and that’s what I did). The second was just as crucial: As my 7 year battle with severe depression began. I spent the next 5 years attacking it by pouring every ounce of my being into humility-based ministry and my newly found passion of weightlifting, resolved to press forward with my highschool years. 

At age 17, I was on top of the world and no one could have convinced me otherwise. Not only did I enter into my first pastoral ministry position as a Student Pastor, but I also excelled in the sport of Strongman by breaking a world record (for teens), winning a world championship, and qualifying for the next year’s Teenage Nationals. Before I knew it, all my past struggles seemed to fade into a distant memory and the thrill of victory took its place. But, as they say, “All good things must come to an end.” As I was closing in on 17 days until competing at nationals and “making a name for myself” as I thought, I completely tore my ACL and meniscus in training, forcing me to withdraw from competition. What followed was the exact opposite of what the past year had been for me. My world and everything I knew in it seemed to disintegrate into dust right before my very eyes. In the months following my successful surgery to repair the torn ligaments in my knee, I developed a serious infection that required an emergency operation to completely clear it up and two follow-up operations. My mentor in ministry passed away, and the stresses of ministry started to weigh crushingly heavy. My closest friends had moved off to college, another significant relationship had failed. I seemed to have lost access to what had been my two primary outlets for all previous struggle. All of this happened in a span of 2 months! To say I was defeated, crushed, hopeless, in despair, angry, confused, broken, lost, and exhausted would be a huge understatement. My tangled web of pent up emotions led me to the worst year of my life. I can honestly say that I spent the middle of 2021 into the middle of 2022 in complete misery both physically and mentally. 

Some of the worst of these battles was when I would pray to God and say “Lord, I have been faithful. Why bring me to this now?! I don’t deserve this pain! Why? Are you taking pleasure in this? Are you even there?” However, I say “some of the worst” because the conversations eventually led to me saying “Lord, take my life or else I am going to do it.” I had reached such a low point in my soul to where nothing mattered to me anymore. In my mind, I was a failure and had let everyone down who loved me. I began to devise a plan of escape from this battle I was convinced I was going to lose: I was going to drive my car off a cliff and call it there. But before I put the plan in motion, I decided to meet with two of my greatest friends, Zac and Jacob, fellow youth pastors, and talk to them one last time. Little did I know, they strongly sensed the darkness in me and agreed to respond in the most God-ordained way that I have ever known. 

The next morning after we met, I decided to skip out on a meeting that we were all supposed to go to as pastors. I just could not force myself to go. I needed to be alone. So, my course of action was to go to my church office, where I knew I would be alone, and to plot the specifics of my plan. While sitting at my desk, I felt the urge to call the number of a local counseling office which had been given to me. I knew it was the Lord leading me, so I said to Him, “Lord I will call this number, but if they don’t answer, I am going through with my plan to end it.” I picked up the phone, called the number… No answer. Now, it was 8:30 in the morning, so I gave them a little grace and decided to wait 45 or minutes and call one more time. Picked up the phone, called the number… And still no answer. I prayed one more time, “Lord, I will call one more time. If they do not pick up, I’m done.” Repeated the process one last time, clinging to the single thread of hope that I had left… Once again, no answer. At this point, all I could do was cry. I had felt abandoned. After crying for several minutes, my phone went off. It was a text from Jacob, asking where I had been that morning. I responded briefly explaining that I just couldn’t get myself to go, to which he expressed understanding and spoke truth. A few short moments later, my phone rang again and it was Zac. The conversation went like this: “Luke, I am calling because I am concerned. I called my dad. He’s a board certified biblical counselor and he has offered to counsel you for free.” I immediately hung up and my tears of despair turned into tears of joy. There were no words I could say, but managed to blubber out “Thank you, Jesus!” The next week, I began counseling and through the course of several months, the Lord truly restored my soul, as He continues to do to this day.

There is no denying the Lord’s gracious and miraculous work in my life. Even in the moments when I was convinced that I was forsaken, God could not have been closer to me. Now, in the midst of the suffering, I could not see, feel, or sense any divine working for my good. All I felt was rage, bitterness, and despair. Yet, that just goes to show the greater grace that God has for me and for you. Though we respond to suffering in anger and display the most extreme impatience one can possibly exhibit, God still works FOR us. What it does take in order to see what God is doing is faithful endurance, my friends.

While writing this article, I have had a lot of time to reflect on those years of my life and something hit me that I am feeling led to address here. It is how we as the Church handle the issue of depression and suicide. If you look around in our world, the secular world seems to have a better understanding of how to help and treat those who suffer from depression. They offer advocates for therapy and a wide range of antidepressant medication. By comparison, the Church is sorely lacking in this area of ministry, and the reason we lack this level of availability to those who suffer is because we misunderstand the nature of depression. 

For the longest time, we in the church have associated depression with punishment. We think if a person is depressed, then they must be guilty of something or they are resisting the Lord’s will somehow. I believe the text I used at the beginning is pure proof that is not always the truth. Depression does not equal conviction. Conviction is conviction. Depression CAN be a product of conviction because of the feeling that there is a void that needs to be filled in one’s life. And that is where the secular world fails. At the end of the day, if one does not have the saving grace of Christ living in their souls, there is no amount of therapy or medication that will fill that void for good. Only Christ can bring a soul never ending, sufficient, and abounding peace. 

With that being said, let us sample the Scriptural evidence of the faithful having depression. We see men like Job, Moses, Jonah, Paul, and even Jesus Himself (who was called “a man of sorrows”) carried the weight of depression. A more modern example is Charles Spurgeon, the “Prince of Preachers”, the most well-read pastor of all time. Starting his ministry at age 17, he pastored the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, England for 38 years, wrote hundreds of books, played crucial roles in the plants of countless churches, and has been used by the Lord to lead thousands of souls to Himself. Despite the abundant proof of his faithfulness to Christ, he still suffered from great and intense depression. The reason why, however, is because of the reality that our revived, Christ-breathing souls still reside in broken bodies dwelling in a sin-ruled world. Our hearts break over what breaks the heart of God. Our hearts rage over what enrages the heart of God. We are spiritually homesick sojourners on this Earth, waiting for the redemption of our mortal bodies in our home in Heaven. What kept our ancestors in the faith going is the same force that should keep all of us going to this day… The Holy Spirit. The unquenchable fire that is the Holy Spirit is the only power that can keep the soul warm despite our having scarred bodies and broken hearts.

This may lead you to ask “Are you saying that all Christians should be depressed?”. Absolutely not. There are several factors to consider. One is genetics. Depression and mental illness can definitely run in a bloodline, just as many other illnesses can. However, God has provided for such people. We as the Church cannot say “antidepressants show lack of faith and an abundance of weakness” and yet say nothing negative about the usage of insulin for diabetes, blood-pressure medication for hypertension, or antibiotics for infections. None of these medicines were created by man to divert people from depending on God. They were gifted from God to man in order to survive and even thrive, to bring glory to His name. 

God has created each of us with unique souls. I know some that are the most joyful, upbeat, and smiley saints alive, because God has blessed them as such. I also know some saints who are naturally melancholy, which is not always a bad thing. I consider myself in that group. God gives us these kinds of states for a peculiar reason. For example, the upbeat saint tends to be very encouraging and uplifting for their brothers and sisters in Christ. The melancholy saint tends to be very empathetic, relatable, and understanding of their fallen brothers and sisters in Christ. Both are equally and greatly used for God’s glory.  So, what I am saying is not that every Christian should be depressed, but that there is a Biblical foundation for the depressed heart that is NOT based on the suffering saint’s own wrong-doing. Therefore, the Church should advocate for those who have depression and suffer from it. Tackling it head on, talking about it and being real with each other is crucial. The American church has tip-toed around it for too long, and it doesn’t take much looking around to see the repercussions of that. So, my final word to the Church is this! We need to get real, open our eyes, and be there for our people. Refuse to be like the hired hand in John 10 who abandoned the sheep because he didn’t truly love them. Don’t reach out to only the people you’re comfortable with helping and abandon the others with whom you’re not. Run towards “the one” and bring them back to “the ninety-nine.”

To the suffering soul, there is hope for you. I pray these words may lead you to look to His Word and see the overwhelming proof that He is WITH you, He is BESIDE you, and He is WORKING for you an eternal weight of glory that is being prepared for you THROUGH your momentary suffering. The road is dark, but His light will never be overtaken by the road’s darkness. If you are one who contemplates taking your own way out, as I once did, talk to someone. Just as God gifted us with certain remedies, one great remedy is found in Godly counsel. My prayer for you is that your heart may be reminded of the great truth that is found in our greater Christ, His everlasting love for you, His abounding grace towards you, and His dwelling Spirit within you. Amen.

(You can reach out to us here at Jars of Clay and we will be glad to have a conversation with you.)