God Will Lead Us through Suffering
Myth #1: It won’t happen to me.
As for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never be moved.”By your favor, O Lord,you made my mountain stand strong;you hid your face;I was dismayed. (Psalm 30:6–7)
Overconfidence may not lead directly to a fall or to depression, but being overconfident hardly prepares one for either. David appears to have expected his spiritual “prosperity” to continue unbroken—the sort of “I’ve finally arrived” attitude that many of us may have experienced briefly before learning that, no, life usually doesn’t continue in an unbroken vista of “personal peace and affluence.”
Even the achieving of those dubious goals does not (thankfully) fully protect us from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” It is better to expect what we are promised in Scripture in the form of unwanted and (hopefully) undeserved suffering. Otherwise, we risk being surprised by that very thing about which we have been repeatedly warned (1 Peter 4:12).
Depression can be quite as fiery a trial as any other, and will be if we imagine that we “shall never be moved.” The good news—outlined explicitly in this same Psalm—is that God does indeed hear the cry of the afflicted, and he does answer those cries with deliverance that ends with mourning turned into dancing and songs of praise. Even if I do not experience depression myself, thinking that I avoid it because it is an impossibility does not equip me to be particularly sympathetic towards those who do suffer. In fact, very many people are significantly depressed at some point in life, sometimes as a result of serious medical illness, sad circumstances, or for no apparent reason at all. If we are led into the suffering which Scripture promises, we must trust God to lead us through it in ways of his choosing.
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