It is strange how depression twists the colors of the world.  It is like a foggy, broken glass, colored with burning smoky haze that all creation must be seen through.  It is nearly impossible to describe what it feels like to someone who has not experienced it’s icy grip.  It may come in so many different ways; a predisposition from birth, the horrors of war, the loss of ones you love, changes in life or a thousand other pressures of this world.  But for all of us it descends silently as a thousand stones pressing on our chest and lives.  It can make even the brightest stars of our lives black, set our hope to fear, and our work to nothing.  And from too many it takes their life.

For some of us, we do not need to look outside and away for the empty places.  Those deserts lay already inside us like all of the dark places between the stars.

God’s place has never been one that is pretty.  I don’t know why we have become obsessed with producing images of a clean, beautiful God that estranges her from the moments of our lives where God presence is most apparent to us as we fight, claw and chew our way through perfected loneliness, torn apart lives, the death of love and loved ones and the darkest nights of the soul.  If there is a God — if there is a Spirit, then that is most certainly where she lay.  She waits in back alleys as the needle breaks the skin, sits around the table at custody negations, beside the angry father as his words rip his daughter’s dreams from her, with the two forbade from showing their love and true selves in the church, those that love with their fullness of self those who will never fully return that love and so many, many others.

Those that have known the darkness of the human soul know desperation for the light of hope.

I love Jesus.  I love my God in the depths of my being.  But my life needs more of the greater who would come follow.  The other part of the one true, who would come to us and create new days for us all.  She who would be in the air, and the water, the fire, and the earth – the earth in the loneliest of alleys on the most fearful of nights.  The one who would bring hope to those that had fallen beyond hope.  She who would hold those whose spirits had broken into pieces, and give us a new spirit.  A Holy Spirit who would give us back a tomorrow which we thought might never come — to give us ourselves and each other.  She is a beautiful song made up of a thousand points of light in the night sky and in every dark place of this earth, so her soft light might clover those who lay in the dark places.

An outcast God for an outcast world.  Hold on.  And look to the stars in the darkest places, and into the deserts of your soul.  Look for the breaking points of light in the stars of heaven.  Look for the garden beginning to grow in your desert places and know you are not alone.  You have never truly been alone.  We have always walked together as a dark company, finding our way toward hope.  For even in our lost places we find each other.  Carry the ones around you who are too weak to walk.  Tell each other stories of love and hope, and be each other’s strength when we dry up our own.

God the father loves you. Christ loves you.  And the Spirit’s love has come for you.

I need more of that God in my life.  I need her hope and her light.  And if you find yourself in the darkness know you are not alone.

Andrew