I am having a bad week. Not a “I’m gonna die so just shoot me now” bad week. Just a bad week. Some things have happened that I don’t like, and while at one level I’ve “handled” them pretty well, made good decisions involving my own health, etc., it has not changed the fact that the fog has rolled in much more than I would like. I feel like I’m in slow moving quicksand, and I’m afraid of a relapse. I don’t want to go back to where I was even a month ago. I want to move forward, but I’m afraid.

This is what we might call Globalizing: taking an isolated event or time period, and extrapolating a whole series of future events that all work off the worst possible construction theory. Now everyone is susceptible to this. Everyone has their moments of despair and when you can’t see the future.

For one suffering from depression, globalizing is, well, more like solarsystemizing.

Instead of thinking of the stead progress that (by God’s grace) I have made over the last six months, I simply catapult back to the worst, the foggiest moments of my illness. It’s absurd. It goes against all of God’s promises for health and healing. It discounts medication, therapy, a supportive family, supportive pastor, and everything else good that has happened to me in the last year.

Yet it is how I feel. It is what I dread. My mind and body tell me that I am going to fall all the way back a year or more.

Is it true?

NO. It’s not true. I’m having some bad days. That’s all it is.

So what do you do when you’re slumping? You do what you know has helped you in the past. Here are a few of mine, but I’m sure you have your own list.

• Get outside.
• Golf
• Work in the shop
• Play chess or some other game (cards) that engages your brain elsewhere.
• Spend quality time with your spouse.
• Have some quiet, but don’t isolate yourself.
• Pray

Those are a few. God’s peace be with you.

-DMR