The beauty of hope

There was no way I could have prepared for what would happen, and there was luckily no one who knew how long it would take before this fog of despair, depression and anxiety would eventually lift.

In the summer of 1988, the first panick attacks started happening. As bolts of lightning out of the drizzling, Western Country sky and with absolutely no premoniton on my part, these horrible, life-draining and paralyzing waves of emotion started ambushing me as I was out walking, or attending college lectures. Even an innocent mob of three boys aged 8 or 9 merely walking by me could trigger an abrupt, overwhelming sensation of fear and apprehension. I tried silently and despairingly to ward these attacks off, but no matter how hard I tried to analyze what was happening, no matter how hard I prayed, I was soon swept away by these uncontrollable emotions. And slowly this vicious fog descended on me with such finality and power that I sometimes thought I would perhaps never recover.

Depression and anxiety clouded more than a decade of my life, and would very nearly have killed me, if it hadn't been for the wonderful resilience and stubbornness of hope. I had been a believer for seven years, and even though my illness made me feel spiritually inferior, and despite the fact that my self-esteem soon would hit rock bottom, blurry rays of comfort and renewed lust for life would at irregular intervals and with varying force offset the worst effects of the condition I was in.

I kept a diary back then, and on its pages I would pour all of my blackest emotions and harrowing memories. I still keep it somewhere, but have rarely touched it. There is so much pain chronicled there, so much recorded time spent in futile longing for the sudden, blissful intervention of Divine healing. Maybe I should have burned it or fed it to some paper-gobbling gadget, but then again I would have lost the opportunity to, someday, contrast my time in the valley of death with where I am now.

I was probably never fully suicidal, although I many times would speculate whether I would be better off dead. I would scream in  anger and supplication towards heaven, begging God for a chance to go where I would feel no weight of hopelessness, where I would shed no slow trickle of tears. But God never seemed to answer those prayers of being raptured to my heavenly home. because whenever I saw myself cornered by depression and anxiety, hope would come to the rescue.

But where did it come from? God seemed a million light-years away most of the time, apparently insensitive to my suffering, unwilling to grant me even the smallest request, and yet on the pages of Scripture, from the warming embraces of fellow believers, from tiny, muffled whispers in my spirit, would come the moments of strength and hope that would keep my death wish at bay. I was perhaps a Job surrounded by well-meaning friends unable to bring resolving counsel, seeing short-lived bouts of optimism severely maimed by renewed onslaughts of phobia. But hope simply refused to surrender.

Because I had been on the sunlit mountaintops before, enjoying the awe-inspiring presence of God and uplifting personal triumphs. I knew that life had smiled to me on countless occasions, and that people had previously sought my company repeatedly, not grudgingly as if coerced by a sense of religious duty, but because they saw in me someone worth spending time with.

Eventually hope prevailed. At long arduous last I would surface from this emotional nightmare. And all because I chose to listen to that still, small voice of hope - and not ignore the gentle whispers that were often crowded out by cycles of black despair.

To this day I'm not sure what caused my terrible time in the trenches of depression. I'm not willing to speculate no more. Because I'm not stuck down there any longer. Hope fed me. Hope lifted me. And hope is sustaining me - even now.