Depression: A Devotional For The Wounded Spirit Намуна

In the Christian world, we often talk about God’s power, His character, and His commands. We’re very familiar with hearing about what God wants from us, how He wants us to live, and who He wants us to be. However, despite the fact we are made in His image, we forget He is also an emotionally complex God.

He does not experience emotions the same way we do, because He is not limited as we are and has not experienced the brokenness of sin. But the Bible refers to many instances where God felt everything from compassion to rage, joy to grief, amusement to jealousy.

So, perhaps you’ve never asked yourself how He feels specifically about YOU. You may instantly respond with the automatic answer of love, and that would be true. But what else? How do you think He feels about your hurt, and the situations that led to it? Knowing that He sees every action and every thought you’ve ever had, how do you think He felt about you in your darkest moments of sin, past or present? What do you think God feels toward you right now?

Most of the time when we are struggling through depression, we either feel that God doesn’t care about our hurt, or that He does to a point but cares more about the “lesson” He’s trying to teach us. With either perspective, we rob Him of His compassionate heart and His powerful emotional connection to us.

It’s difficult to understand what emotion looks like on an invisible, perfect, and all-powerful Being, which is why we look at Jesus - God in the flesh - to give us a portrait of our Maker. One of the first and most beautiful descriptions of Jesus called Him “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.” Two lines further, we see why - “he took up our pain and bore our sorrow.”

This isn’t a God who tells us to grin and bear it because He has a plan. This is a God whose heart breaks with ours, a God who does not stand above us shaking His head at our mess, but enters into the mud and heaviness with us. How could real, unconditional love do anything less?

So go ahead. Ask God how He feels about you and what you’re going through, and know that His response will be tender because His heart does break with ours.