If I Had A Basket...

Woke at 3:30 this morning and began cleaning out a desk drawer stuffed with old papers. I wanted a quiet project so I would not wake Ginny that early.

As I sorted old papers I came across a copy of the Burns Depression Checklist. Dr. David D. Burns is a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine; he pioneered in the field of cognitive therapy.

I tossed the checklist in the trashcan.

Then I thought better of it and pulled it out again.

I answered the test questions.

My score shocked me. I scored off the chart in severe depression.

If you’d have asked me if I were depressed, I’d have answered, “No. I’m fine”. But as I reviewed specifics, I realized that the only thing that keeps me from being an emotional basket case is that I don’t have a basket.

Later in the morning, when Ginny and I ate breakfast at Dave’s Diner, I told her my findings. She attributed my depression to the recent crash of my hard drive causing the loss of tons of work. “I could tell that really threw you for a loop,” she said.

But as we talked, I realized that the current bout of depression goes back long before my hard drive fiasco.

Like a boat with a slow leak, I’ve been gradually sinking. Nothing so dramatic as hitting an iceberg like the Titanic, just a slow, almost imperceptible settling lower and lower in the water.

For the next in my Dirty Old Man series of books I think I’ll use the title A Dirty Old Man Sinks Lower.

Ginny says that I’ve struggled with depression for the 40 years we’ve been married and that she knew she was getting damaged goods even before she married me. She compared my depression with her diabetes. “You can’t cure it,” she said, “But you can manage it”.

Even with all that, she says I’m a fun guy to be around.

Sometimes.

Looking back over my past journal entries, I see the current bout with depression may have started as long ago as last September or October. But it’s grown so gradually that I did not realize it was returning.

I keep this journal to show what the Christian life is like for one lone guy—Me. I don’t presume to show what the Christian life is supposed to be, but how it works out for me. And my postings are evangelistic only in the sense that I want to show someone who is thinking of becoming a Christian what they may be getting into.

Mostly, I write for myself and for the kid in the attic who may come across my old journals 50 years from now.

So, I’m beginning to realize that recently I’ve been struggling with symptoms of depression without addressing the causes. My conversation with Mark, my son-in-law, the other night and the Burns test this morning have been an eye-opener for me.

Yes, Mark is a young whippersnapper, but he’s a wise young whippersnapper.

While I’ve been aware of a vague sense of something’s not right, now that I see I’m depressed, I can take steps to fight it. The thing just snuck up on me; I’m so low in the water that I see fish swim before my eyes and I wonder what they are doing up here in the air.

Like the old country/western song says, “ I’ve Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me”.

But the first sep toward solving a problem is knowing there is a problem.

Only the sick seek the Physician.

This brings me to the question of how a man as sinful (see numerous former postings) and depressed and messed up as I am dare claim to be a Christian?

Doesn’t Jesus save and satisfy?

Doesn’t He generate instant purity?

Doesn’t He solve all your problems?

Not necessarily.

I draw comfort from an odd source in the Scripture: the first few verses of the very first book, Genesis...

“And darkness was upon the face of the deep… And God said, ‘Let there be light”… And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day”.

Ok, there are only 24 hours in a day.

Everyone knows that.

But half of those 24 hours are hours of dark.

Yet the whole shebang goes by one name—Day.

And we all say that—Only 24 hours in a day.

So, I think God looks at me and sees my darkness, my sins and my sin, and my depression, and my goofs, and my failings, and all my darkness. Yet He also sees His Son in me—Christ in you, the hope of glory.

And He calls the whole shebang by one name—Christian.

Because of His love, I dare to call myself by the Name.

No, I don’t have a basket.

And, Thanks Be To God, I don’t need one.