2004-10-26 - 10:40 p.m.

“making life better”

With the exception of a few good patches, I had been fairly depressed for much of the last three days. I don’t want to dwell on that since I am feeling pretty good right now, and a good thing that has come out of that is that it made me think about things. Why have I been depressed over the longer term? Will I ever be healed?

My appointment with the doctor yesterday has made me realise a few things. I realised that I am already getting as much help from people as they can practically give and the rest is up to me. But this has been hard to accept because I just wished there were one magic pill that would heal me instantly. Ever since I started seeing doctors I knew there was something different about me, and I just thought it was a simple question of finding the right medical treatment and I would be back to normal in no time.

Likewise when I first became a Christian, it was great, but as life went on, I became dissatisfied. It felt wrong to feel anything less than completely satisfied – what could I possibly have to complain about since I had received the greatest gift of all? But I wanted what I could see that others around me had; the social relationships and casual happiness.

So I was drawn towards a brand of church that promised these things. All I had to do, apparently, was to have faith that God would heal me, and he would. Somewhere in the Bible God says “I am the Lord, who heals you.” This brand of church wasn’t too fussed about the context in which God said this and between their enthusiasm and my desperation to be healed, I was able to gloss over that. All I had to do was believe, and also periodically remind God of his promise, and I would be healed. It’s remarkable how easy it is to have faith that God will do something when it is something you actually want him to do.

The weeks and months passed. I still had Asperger’s (although it wasn’t diagnosed as such at that stage) and depression. Surely God can not dishonour his promise, so there must have been another perfectly logical explanation, so I sought advice. Was I in ‘intentional’ sin? I examined myself carefully. A popular and well-respected member of the church asked whether I was giving 10 percent of my welfare payment to the church. I was, but just in case I had forgotten at some stage in the past, I gave a little extra.

The years passed. I travelled, had a girlfriend here and there, and lived life in spite of my problems. I was greatly blessed to find a church which holds to sola fide. Yet I continued to get depressed. I wanted to be ‘normal’. So I got the Anthony Robbins CDs. They did give me a boost for a while (until around the time I got banned from the Anthony Robbins web forum for being an imperfect person), and certainly I gleaned a lot of positive things from them, but ultimately ridiculous amounts of money and power were not what I was after – I just wanted to be normal.

Now I face the unpleasant possibility that Asperger’s would affect me my whole life and depression will also hang around as a side effect which has to be “managed”. I had a conversation with Fh.A on Sunday night and he mentioned this passage:

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? - Mark 8:34-36

I have known for a while that I must always trust that God is in control. But it is only relatively recently that I have realised that in order to trust that God is in control you have to admit that you are not in control of God. I pray that I will get healed, I know that is what I want badly. But it may not happen in which case I determine to trust the one who knows what is best.

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