Overcoming Anxiety & DepressionSample

Not Broken, But Empty

While our focus and our words play a huge role in how we feel, there are other components to it as well. While the results of being empty and broken can look the same, there is a difference between being empty and being broken. If I take my car on a drive and don’t put gas in it, eventually it will stop going. Is it broken? No, it's empty. It won't work until I refill it. But the solution isn’t to replace the engine, it is to refill the fuel. Many times, we run our bodies on empty and then call them broken when the engine begins to sputter. God laid out a principle of rest from the beginning. He set aside a day every week to rest. He made the Sabbath a law for Israel. While our justification is by grace through faith in what Jesus did, not from fulfilling the law, Jesus says it was for us. Mark 2:27 says, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” God knew that we need rest to be part of our rhythm. When we look at Jesus' life and ministry, He took time to pull away from the crazy and spend time praying and recharging with the Father. (Matthew 14:23) He taught His disciples to do the same. It's easy to get caught up in the busyness of our world, but while on the most important mission ever, Jesus still took and taught, taking time to rest. The world, too, is starting to recognize this principle.

The United Nations, in its official statement for World Health Day in 2017, announced that we need to talk less about chemical imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live. More and more experts -- neurologists, psychiatrists, counselors, psychologists, and sociologists -- now conclude that depression (and its partner, anxiety) most often results from our lifestyle. In many cases, we’re doing it to ourselves. Dr. Stephen Ilardi, a clinical psychologist and depression researcher, expertly sums up the lifestyle problem in his book The Depression Cure: “We were never designed for the sedentary, socially isolated, sleep-deprived, poorly nourished, indoor, frenetic pace of modern American Life.”

If you are struggling with depression or anxiety, it may be time to look and see if the battle is caused by something that is broken, things being empty, or out of balance. Learning how to balance and recharge is super important.