When you only see despair

The problems often seem too big. The pain can be too intense, squeezing your chest so tight you fear your heart may burst. You can’t see a way forward, and you don’t know how things can be fixed. How can there be any hope at all? I’ve struggled with depression my entire life, riding the […]

Why hope matters

Depression comes in many varieties. There’s the subtle type that most of us deal with off and on, a slight melancholy that hits us throughout the day for different reasons and passes quickly. There’s the all-consuming experience of panic, which can make you absolutely desperate and tempt you to make drastic choices for any kind […]

The shattered pieces of our hearts

My body and my heart have been betraying me lately. Physical illness combined with a broken heart is a heck of a one-two punch and can take us to really dark places. But I don’t want to write yet another lament about my misfortunes in love. The temptation is there as I wrestle once more […]

The point of Christmas: draw near

I’m worn out and depressed. I’ve been going through a lot of changes lately, and I’m not happy with many of the results. I lost a job and am adjusting to a new one with a long commute, and subsequently I moved apartments to cut down on said commute, so I’ve been packing and unpacking […]

Trust and hope

You’ve heard it before, but there are few guarantees in life. Given that fact, it’s easy to view trust and hope as idiotic things. Why should anyone trust anyone else or hope in things that may very well never come to pass? I once thought I had some good answers to those questions, but time […]

How to find peace

Like any good sermon, this post is written more for myself than anyone else. I’ve been pretty miserable for a good portion of my life. From panic attacks and depression as a young boy to inheriting the worldview of a family that doesn’t necessarily always look on the bright side, my predisposition has been […]

Where fear, panic and despair die

Each of us lives in two realities. One reality is the external world in which we interact with each other, where we work, we go to school, and where objective things happen to us: we get a new job, babies are born, loved ones die, and so on. The other reality is our internal thought […]