Last week I sat at my my friend’s kitchen table and spoke to her as we drank tea. I talked about coming to a point in my life where it felt like I was questioning and reevaluating everything I’d ever believed or been told. I told her that I felt like the things I was passionate about didn’t fit in the church. We spoke of depression, and self-care, and the “dark night of the soul.” I was incredibly thankful to have someone to talk to, someone who would really listen to what I was saying and who had gone through similar things. She encouraged me and told me about the things that had helped her. However, the most important thing she told me was that sadness wasn’t wrong. She told me that everyone went through periods of darkness, and sometimes all you could do was wait them out. She told me that times of lament were just as important as times of rejoicing.

I think that much of the time we confuse joy and happiness. Happiness is an emotion, a chemical response in the brain to an event or a memory or an image. It is not something that we can experience all of the time, nor would we want to. I imagine it would be exhausting. Joy, on the other hand, is a state of mind, an attitude. I can be sad, upset, or even depressed, and still have joy. Because joy isn’t contingent on my emotions. Joy means that no matter what I feel, I have an inner source of contentment, a belief that everything will be all right in the end. For me, as a Christian, that inner source is God.

Everyone experiences periods of sadness, sometimes extending into clinical depression. As I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, I don’t feel that I can speak about it with any sort of certainty. However, I have felt sadness and I have felt despair and sometimes I feel that there’s really nothing I want to live for. And I have believed that those feelings go against what God wants. I have believed that I have to fix myself, that I have to make myself happy. Because I’m a Christian, I have God, why shouldn’t I be happy? But the thing is, these feelings are just that, feelings. They are not born out of disloyalty or dissatisfaction with God. I can believe that God is sovereign, and that he loves me, and still feel sadness. It doesn’t mean that I don’t trust him.

I think that a lot of times Christians feel that they should be able to make themselves better. That sadness and depression are spiritual hurdles that have to be overcome by power of will. But when we open Scripture we find that so many men and women of God experienced despair. If we open the book of Psalms, we find that a sizeable portion of these songs are songs of lament. Psalm 88:14 asks “Oh Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?” This psalm ends with the words “you have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness” (88:18). If that doesn’t speak of despair I don’t know what does. Jesus was grieved to the soul in the garden of Gethsemane, so much so that he cried tears of blood. If I think I have to be better than him there is something seriously wrong with my reasoning.

I have experienced sadness and apathy before, and I am experiencing them now. If you are as well, then I reach out my hand to you. What I had to learn is that I can feel my sadness. I can acknowledge it and sit with it and let it fill me. I don’t need to overcome it. Because even while I am feeling these things I know that God is sovereign and that my feelings don’t affect that. I trust him, and I trust that he will lead me out of the darkness when my time is up. But for now I will wait, and I will feel this sadness for myself and for others because it deserves to be felt. And when it leaves me I will be deeper and richer for it.