Solutions in a box ... I wish

CCEF just published a great interview with Ed Welch about depression; if you have the time to dig into it, you'll be doing yourself a favor.

It's not really a spoiler to share the last paragraph of an interview, is it? I think this quote holds true for ANY ministry that we find ourselves in...

In some ways, I would like to find one breakthrough moment that works for everybody when they're depressed, but I haven't. Yet, knowing the way God often works, we wouldn't anticipate any one strategy to work. If we thought we could put a solution in a box, put it all in the system, we would try to do it in our own strength, and there would be no calling out to the Lord. For those people who love the depressed person, there would be no helplessness, no calling out to the Lord to minister to their loved one either, in the kind of desperate neediness the Lord so treasures. So we can see why God doesn't give us a package or a system that always works by human standards. What I find, however, is that God does break through. It can be through someone getting together with another person for lunch. It can be through someone showing up at another person's home and just helping with things around the house. There may be somebody who makes a passing comment in church such as, "I just want you to know I pray for you every single day." It's so like the Lord to take very ordinary expressions of love and use them to begin to break through to depression.