In 1991, I attended a seminar at a large Christian gathering in Indianapolis. I was a deeply wounded adolescent asking questions too deep for an adolescent’s heart. My eyes were damaged by complications of premature birth, and I had lived for all of my life with only a small amount of vision. Just weeks before the conference, I lost that vision very suddenly. Why didn’t God heal me? Was God angry with me? Did God love me at all?
I tried to put these things aside during that weekend, especially when I had the opportunity to hear Sheila Walsh speak. I had loved her music for several years, and she was speaking about dealing with temptation. I sat on the front row and tried to take it all in. … I ended up weeping, and I could not stop. Something she said touched a place so deep inside of me that a torrent was released. Someone knew about pain, and it would have been safe for me to speak it. It wasn’t shameful, and God didn’t hate me.
It was a day that I will never forget. I bought another of Sheila’s CDs. I didn’t know that she herself was struggling with depression. I never watched the 700 Club, and I am not certain at what point I became aware that she had published an account of her treatment in a psychiatric hospital. By the time I read her book, Honestly, I had become personally familiar with the world of counselors and psychiatric medications.
I have been looking forward greatly to the release of this new book that tells the story of her journey 20 years after treatment in the hospital. I read and often sighed deeply in agreement. But at the end I weapt just as deeply as I did in 1991, though for a different reason.
To tell the truth about what living with depression is like is terrifying. I know–I have lived it and have kept myself hidden behind personal walls so that only a “good face” is presented for other people to see. To tell the truth about what the process of getting help does to one’s life is even more terrifying. It means much more than saying in a factual way, “It can hurt your career and mess up your relationships.” Telling the truth in a way that lets other people know they are not alone and helps people understand what living with depression is like means exercising brutal honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and to let one’s life be the teacher. One of the challenges of depression is that vulnerable is the last thing a person wants to be.
In Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free, Sheila Walsh tells her truth with grace and courage. If you have read her previous book, Honestly, you will recognize some of this story; but you will also find it a refreshing read. Sheila has expanded many of the vignettes and offered a much deeper account of her journey. Her story is clear and vulnerable and her comfort with herself and God’s love for her is evident.
The best part of this story is that depression and the hospital is not the end! God is a God of second chances, and where there is all kinds of wreckage because of depression and hospitalization there is also opportunity for God to rebuild. Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free is not just a story about depression. It is also a story about rebuilding. Honestly was published not long after Sheila began that journey; and if you read that book you won’t want to miss this one. The follow-up journey is a joy to read!
The rebuilding journey is also a journey that I live every day. Everyone’s rebuilding journey is unique. Mine is different from Sheila’s. But reading her story touched me in such a critical place because it made me think about how many things we have in common amid those differences. So many people try to take control of the rebuilding process or force it into the mold that they think society expects it to take. This is such an important thing for the Church to understand! That act of trying to control the rebuilding process is part of the “problem” that had hold in the first place.
It is not easy to think differently from what depression tells you. If you struggle with these things, or if you cannot fathom how a person could struggle with such things, please buy Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free. If you are a pastor, please read it and put one in your church library. I really cannot recommend this enough.
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