Depressed without Reason?
By Paul
You don’t even crack a smile at the same jokes that usually crack you up. You make your friends uncomfortable around you and even act out angrily toward them. Your tolerance for other people gets increasingly low, even when their intentions are great. Once somebody finally asks you, “What’s wrong?” even if you are too upset to answer, you’re forced to think about it in your head. Did something happen to you that day? Maybe. Or maybe not. Why would you be so depressed without even having a solid reason?
The writer of Psalms 42 and 43 wonder the same thing. Within the 16 verses, the writer asks three times, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?” Twice he states that he “goes about in mourning, oppressed by the enemy.” The psalm writer was dead on in his evaluation of life. These feelings were the same 3000 years ago as they are now.
So, then, what’s the deal? Nobody likes that feeling. But, even if we can’t pinpoint it; that depressed feeling doesn’t come without a reason. King David talks about the same thing earlier in the Psalms, in Psalm 32: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” David knows the problem, though. He continues, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’— and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
In the last 3000 years, human life hasn’t changed far too much. Fortunately for us, neither has God. Confession of sins still results in forgiveness. So, to finish Psalm 43, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.”