Hey viewers, I was planning another more positive post, but today I heard someone say something that shook me up. I heard someone say they should just kill themselves.

I don’t have much to say about it. But I have felt that way too.

Reach higher.

People like me, we get our hopes up, set ourselves these high reaching goals; and imagine what a fulfilling existence would be like…and then we find ourselves stuck in the day to day living.

“Any idiot can survive a crisis, it’s the day to day living that wears you out.” Unknown source

I was never more depressed in my life than in the two years I spent prior to finding God. I don’t mean I never enjoyed myself in that time, or that I didn’t eat, or anything like that; but I lived everyday with the underlying question why I was so miserable.

I am so different now it’s hard to believe it, that part of my life seems so small and shell-like. But I still get reminded of it from time to time. I used to feel sick to my stomach nearly everyday, because I felt that way whenever I was scared or nervous or just plain worrying. I used to be a hypochondriac and feel sick whenever I heard or read about illness. I used to have irrational fears of monsters and other stuff I won’t go into. And those were the small problems. My overall problem was fear. Like Charlie Brown, I was afraid of everything.

Fear has torment. That’s why it makes you depressed. Fear makes you hopeless if it stays too long.

The second time in my life I was depressed was when I’d been a Christian for a year or two, and God just went into hiding. Every believer deals with this sooner or later. And knowing that helped, but for awhile I felt like my faith was pointless.

That experience taught me so much. I learned that faith is not a feeling. Because when you feel bad, even if you believe your religion is based on facts and knowledge, then it looks false. I learned that praising God when you don’t feel like it is sometimes the only thing that brings Him closer, and that’s not for Him, it’s for us, to remember what kind of God we serve. But I also learned that God doesn’t leave, He simply becomes less visible so you have to search deeper and deeper to find him. And that can either make you angry, if you let it; or it can make you stronger.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I think when God says His ways are higher than our ways, He means that the way he chooses to do things is what it best, even though it makes no sense to us at all. But until we can admit that our ways are the lesser because we are the lesser, we can’t be raised up to see His point of view. That’s why Christians are always talking about going higher than before, and being lifted up. But non-Christians get this concept too when they realize that maturity is a thing, and what it looks like. (And no one is born knowing that.) Maturity is the simplest example of what I’m talking about. It’s the difference between pretending to bake a cake a s a kid, and actually baking one as a young cook (and messing it up probably) and then finally learning how to do it right. At first there is no real difficulty, and no real reward either; then there’s a lot of difficulty and still no reward; then you get to be good at it and the reward is two-fold, the cake and the accomplishment.

But first of all you have to want to. And to want to you have to be hungry. I’ve heard this over and over again. Hunger never gets any easier does it? In fact, it gets harder. But if you learn to understand it, then you can do something about it. Maybe we all wish there were easier ways to achieve the Great things in life. But that is because we are down here, and we need to be higher. (I guess I had plenty to say after all. It’s gotten easier to talk about the rough patches of my life.)

As you all can see, I have no picture perfect existence. I’ve talked a lot about my faith in this post, because I had to, there is just no other way to understand things like this. I got shaken up, and it’s happened before, and it hurts every time. But nothing has taken me out yet, and nothing has to take you out either. My advice if you’re feeling bad is to hold on; play good music; read a good book; chat with a good friend about it; and keep holding on.

Until next time–Natasha