Since we traveled back and forth to Parkersburg every week, and took vacations, to keep me occupied, my parents bought me a little portable chess set. It was about 9 inches square, folded up and kept the little plastic pieces in yellow foam cut-out holes. I played hundreds of games on that set. But somewhere along the way, I lost a pawn. The game set was now incomplete. It bothered me – I must have looked all over the car and all over the house for that missing pawn. But I never found it. I put a penny into the set to replace the pawn. I took the set to college with me.
I came across the set about three years ago. I opened it up – there were all the pieces in the now-deteriorating yellow foam – except the missing pawn. And it made me sad. All those good memories from my youth – but the set was incomplete. And that incompleteness made me sad.
When I left college, I moved to Johnson City, TN to a job with Texas Instruments. Soon I was managing a line of products. It was exciting, I was busy, the job kept me at work many evenings until 7, 8, or even 9 o’clock, and I’d go home and rest and then be at work at 8 o’clock the next morning. But after a year or so, I had my job and my product line under control. Now, I was home by 6 pm most every evening. I had time to spare. And I realized I was lonely – I was in my mid-twenties and was not dating, didn’t have a girlfriend, nor even a pet. Things were incomplete in my life and this made me sad. So I bought a kitten, which helped until I met Saundra a few years later.
Today, I talk to people who have sad eyes, and they ask me a question. “When can we get back to normal in our church?” And I look beyond the eyes and see that great sadness – where are my friends? Where are the rituals I could depend upon? Where is the stability in the country? Why do I feel so sad?
Today’s world has a name for this. Depression. If sadness is a twilight, depression is midnight. It is the sadness that continues day-after-day. I want to explore this a bit today, because we or friends or relatives of ours are depressed. Covid has put many people into a dark time. We all know sadness – and most of us are depressed or have someone close to us who is depressed. But, as usual, God has the answer!
Our minds and hearts and souls are very much attuned to having things complete. Whenever I look at my chess set, I see in my mind the missing piece and I am sad. If I had dwelt upon it, I would have become depressed. It is a minor thing, though, and I was able to complete the set – sort of – with a penny. But there is always a twinge of sadness when I think about that lost piece.
Jesus spoke of the missing piece. In Luke 15:1-10, Jesus tells two stories:
Then Jesus told them this parable: “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.
“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
The missing piece. Incompleteness. It probably wasn’t worth the shepherd’s time to hunt down and chase down that missing sheep. It probably wasn’t worth the woman’s time to so carefully search for the missing coin. But neither could be joyful, neither could be happy until they found what they were missing. When I was single, I was not happy until I found my wife Saundra, who made me complete.
The psychologists talk about the causes of depression. To simplify, they believe that there are physical causes, events, and chemical imbalances. Let’s take a look at these causes and then come back to what the Bible has to say. First, the physical causes:
Physical Causes of Depression
The people who live in Scandinavia – Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland – speak of a disease we call “SAD” – Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is a physical issue. And it affects those of us who live in America as well. Put simply, it is feeling sad or depressed because we are not getting enough sunlight. It really hits us beginning this time of year as the days grow shorter and darker. Bright sunlight, particularly in the morning, is critical for our body to be upbeat. In fact, Sweden has a law which requires all employees to have access to natural sunlight at their desks, which has led to interesting business architecture with skylights and big windows. In particular, they make sure that their lighting is that bluish-white light that says “wake up” rather than the yellow light that says, “Go to sleep”.I had two grandmothers. They lived next door to each other. One was an optimistic woman, her home was filled with light, curtains wide open, decorated in yellows and greens, and she was almost always joyful. The other lived in a dark home, with dark browns and orange decorations, dim yellow lights, heavy, closed curtains. A visit to her was sad and heavy.
One day, she moved across the street to a new home with a big bay window and other open windows. She became cheerful! If you are feeling sad, brighten up your home – particularly as the darkness of winter approaches. Make sure you have some of the blueish white lights, for that will lift your mood.
The Bible talks of “leaving the darkness and entering the light.” God knew this relationship and pointed out to the Bible writers time and again that darkness is related to sadness and light is related to joy. In the beginning was darkness and God had to create light. One of the Ten plagues that hit the Egyptians was a plague of darkness – “darkness that can be felt”, it says in Exodus 10. In 2 Samuel 22, David sings a song. Part of the song is this: “You, LORD, are my lamp; the LORD turns my darkness into light.” This verse points out that God is like a lamp – God ‘turns my darkness into light.” Brighten up your room with light and you may chase away your depression darkness. Come close to God and you will have joy!
Another physical cause of depression is illness. If you are ill, your body slows down in order to save energy to fight the illness,. We become sad and withdrawn, for the body wants us to stop running around and instead, sleep. If you know you are ill, expect a bit of sadness and even depression. It’s normal. Get your sleep when you are sick!
Perhaps one of the biggest causes of sadness in America today is caffeine. Now I know that caffeine lifts you up. A cup of coffee or a glass of cola perks us up! But about 4 to 6 hours later, the caffeine goes away and that lets our body down. We “crash” off the caffeine, whether it was delivered by coffee, cola, tea, or chocolate. The caffeine temporarily blocks receptors that tell our brain our body is tired. Then, as your kidneys clear the caffeine from our body, those receptors suddenly are open and our brain figures out that we are tired – or even exhausted. And we either have to go to sleep or get a new charge of caffeine.
But if we don’t recognize what is happening, we may experience a sudden wave of sadness. Nothing has truly changed – except our caffeine has gone away and we suddenly feel down. We may cry. And if you are one of those people who says coffee doesn’t affect you – well, my doctor friends would just say that’s further proof that you are very addicted to caffeine. Many college students experience sudden depression – but the true cause of this depression is the let-down from the morning or the late-night coffee. And the let-down that happens to the meth addict is ten times worse.
Notice that each one of these physical causes of depression is incompleteness. We are missing enough sunlight, we are missing good health, we are missing caffeine that we previously had.
Chemical Imbalances
Much of the same thing happens in other cases. We all have heard that we should average 8 hours of sleep a night. As we go without enough sleep, night-after-night missing just a couple hours of sleep, getting six good hours of sleep, chemicals begin to go out of balance in our body and in our brain. We begin to over-react to situations – we break a dish, a cheap glass, and we begin to cry. We hit a suicidal bird that has flown into our car and it bothers us the rest of the day. We drop a cup of coffee and it just destroys us for the next hour. Once again, something is incomplete – and the root problem is that our sleep has been incomplete for the last four days. The only solution is to hit the bed three or four hours early.My son pointed out to me that in ancient times, people looked at sleep as a time of preparing for the new day, not, as we often do, as a time of recovery from this day or an annoying time that we cannot work or be productive. No, look at sleep as a necessary preparation for tomorrow and guard it carefully. Ask yourself – is the fourth quarter of the football game really important to see? Do we really need to watch the eleven o’clock news?
Saundra and I head to bed around 9 pm on Saturday nights, because we have found that if we don’t get enough sleep our sermon delivery will suffer because our brain chemicals go out of balance without enough sleep. And similar problems happen with too much alcohol, with certain cold medicines, and with too much sugar in our diets. Each of these can mess with our brain chemistry and lead to sadness.
Life Events
But there are big life events that cause sadness or depression. We lose a job – and we have just lost our daily purpose in life. We lose a loved one – and part of our purpose for living is gone, part of our day is gone, a good friend is missing. A relationship breaks up or there is a divorce. Half of our soul is now missing. Our home burns, floods, or disappears in a tornado – and many of our “things” that have memories attached to them are gone. In every one of these cases, the root problem is that something in our life is incomplete. Something is missing. Something is gone and can not easily be replaced. We will not feel right until we replace what is missing.Have you ever seen a cat or dog whose child owner goes away to college or to camp? The animal goes from room to room, looking for the missing child. When the bus runs, they run to the door to wait for their return. The animal is confused, lonely, missing their human friend. Their world has become incomplete.
The Bible - Job
In the Bible’s Old Testament Book of Job, Job, a good man, has had a bad day. His oxen and donkeys were taken by raiders, His servants were killed by those raiders, he has lost his livestock and shepherds to lightning, and all his sons and daughters, who were partying together, were killed by a tornado that collapsed the house where they were. Soon afterwards, he was struck by a disease that gave him painful, itchy sores. So Job may have become depressed. You can judge. Listen to his comments beginning in Job Chapter 3:After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 He said:
3 “May the day of my birth perish,
and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’
4 That day—may it turn to darkness;
may God above not care about it;
may no light shine on it.
5 May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more;
may a cloud settle over it;
may blackness overwhelm it.
6 That night—may thick darkness seize it;
may it not be included among the days of the year
nor be entered in any of the months.
7 May that night be barren;
may no shout of joy be heard in it.
8 May those who curse days curse that day,
those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.
9 May its morning stars become dark;
may it wait for daylight in vain
and not see the first rays of dawn,
24 For sighing has become my daily food;
my groans pour out like water.
25 What I feared has come upon me;
what I dreaded has happened to me.
26 I have no peace, no quietness;
I have no rest, but only turmoil.”
Do you think Job was depressed? Darkness had entered Job’s life. Major catastrophe had struck. And Job feels terrible.
When we watch the television news, when we read negative and arguing Facebook posts, when we watch tension-filled tv shows that kill off favorite characters, it can set us into a depression. It is like everything that happened to Job is happening to us!
The British show “Downton Abbey” was a favorite for many years on PBS. A few seasons into the show, the actor that played a favorite character decided to move to America to take more lucrative movie roles, and the character was killed off. The fans were both angry and depressed for months! And this was because of the death of a character, not even a real person! How many of you remember the let-down when WVU failed to make a bowl game? The season was incomplete!
Turning Sadness into Joy
What can we do when bad things happen in our lives? How can we turn that dark sadness into joyful life? How do we climb out of the darkness into the light?There are several steps to this. The first thing we need to do is to recognize that sadness happens because something in our life is incomplete. We’ve lost a chess piece, we don’t have a complete relationship, we don’t have health, we may not have enough sunlight. We may have a chemical imbalance because we’ve lost sleep or have a new medicine that messes with us. So we need to first sit and think and try to find the missing piece. We need to find our missing sheep or find our missing piece of silver.
But what if we can’t figure out what is missing in our life? That’s when we sit and ask God for help. We pray, asking what is missing in our life. Sometimes it is a comfortable person in the room with us, sometimes it is a set of friends from a job. It may even be something as simple as missing a particular food because that restaurant has closed.
When we moved to the Adamston neighborhood of Clarksburg, after a time, Saundra and I became sad and somewhat restless. And then we figured out what the problem was. We were missing the woods. We could not walk outside and enjoy the trees that had come up close by our home at Quiet Dell. And so we began to get in the car once a week and drive out along a couple of rural highways, and watch the leaves skitter in front of the car. It really helped.
But what if the life event has taken a loved one from us? What if it is the loved one that is missing? This is where God really steps in. For God is here beside us, watching every move we make and every word we say. And Jesus has told us about the lost sheep and the lost coins: “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
Joy comes in Heaven when people turn to God. And this joy isn’t just for the first time we turn to God. The joy is there every time we turn to God for help in our lives!
It has been said that despair is one of the worst sins. Perhaps. But we have the word of Jesus that “there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons.” If despair is a sin, then turning back to God for hope is surely repentance. And Heaven is joyful because you just turned back to God. Let that joy flow into you!
Turning to God for Answers
Above all else, God wants us to turn to God for answers. For God knows the answers and we often don’t. But a deep time of prayer, speaking and listening to the Holy Spirit’s response, will often provide us the answers.I was in a hospital room a few years ago with an older woman and her husband, who was in his final coma, heading toward Jesus. They had been married for over 60 years. Both of them were strong believers and were in their late 80’s, had led in the church, and raised their children as believers. They had relied upon what they read in the Bible and what the Holy Spirit of God told them. And now he had just a few hours left. It was at that possibly sad moment that the woman said words the effect that “This is when we are grateful for the years we’ve had.” And, knowing her and her wisdom, I know that she was thinking that the next week would be terrible, the next few months would be difficult and things would never be complete again, but she also knew, looking back over all those years, that God would get her through until she went to be at home with Jesus and her husband, and that that time would not be so long, even if it was another ten or 15 or even 20 years.
For you see, everything terrible that happens in this life is temporary. Everything is a blink of an eye compared to eternity. Our great mistake is believing that bad things last forever and good times are short-lived. Just the opposite is true. God designed the world so that just the opposite is true.
Think of terrible times in your lives. The unemployment only lasted a few months, a year or two at most. The relationship ended, and the only thing that keeps the sadness going in your life is your refusal to let go and step forward to live again. JFK was shot and buried a week later. Johnson was putting forth his proposals a couple months later. Even World War II lasted less than five years for America, despite all the shows that have covered every angle for the last 75 years. 9/11 was almost twenty years ago. The bird of sadness has come and gone. It flies away quickly - if we let it.
Depression happens when we take the bird of sadness and allow it to build a nest in our emotions. Depression happens when we believe that we can never be complete again. Depression happens when we refuse to stand up and search for the missing sheep, the missing piece of silver, the missing chess piece. And sometimes, we can’t find that missing chess piece, but a copper penny will do for most purposes. Chase that bird of sadness away by inviting the dove of the Holy Spirit to talk with you.
So stand up, figure out what is missing, ask for God’s help until you know what is missing, and then ask God to replace what is missing.
But God won’t replace the missing with a duplicate of the missing. God is not that cheap. If we will search for life and pray for God’s help, God will replace the missing job or the missing relationship with something or someone much better. How do I know? I look once again to the story of the man in the Bible who lost his family and his wealth in one day.
Job's Trust in God
That horrible day, Job lost 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, a large number of servants, seven sons and three daughters.Job spoke to God and God spoke to Job. And because Job never lost faith in God, because Job maintained his integrity, trusting that God was just and fair and trustworthy, God restored to Job everything that he had lost – giving him twice as many livestock – fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys, seven sons, and three daughters who were considered the most beautiful in the land. He lived to age 140.
That’s the story of Job.
But there is another reason I know that God will make the bad times temporary and the good times last for eternity.
Jesus
One day in Jerusalem, a good man, Jesus of Nazareth was arrested, beaten and killed for claiming to be God walking upon the earth. Jesus was buried that Friday evening in a rock-hewn tomb. On Sunday morning, reports began to circulate that first a group of women, then his two closest students, then two more students and finally a group of ten students saw Him alive again. Over the next forty days, He was seen in at least eleven different appearances, in different places, by over five hundred people, He walked with them, He talked with them, He ate with them, He even made breakfast for seven of the disciples on the shore of the Lake of Galilee. And He promised all who choose to follow Him will live forever, which definitely will be a good time. He promised this would happen if you chose to follow Him. You will live forever and walk with Jesus on the riverbank in New Jerusalem under the Tree of Life in that city which does not need sunlight for God gives the light.You know, I sometimes wondered why Jesus only met with seven of the disciples on the shore of the lake after His Resurrection. Until I realized that throughout the Bible, from Genesis Chapter One when the days of the week were set, to the candlesticks and churches of Revelation – seven is the number of completion. When Jesus is around, everything is complete. Nothing is incomplete. There is no reason to be sad. There is no reason to be depressed, for Jesus completes everything.
Amen?
Father God,
I pray for the people of this church and all those watching and listening online and on the FM radio. I pray especially for those who have been feeling sad, lonely or depressed. Let them feel Your presence beside them every day. Help them find what has been missing in their lives, how they have been incomplete. And help them learn to listen to Your Holy Spirit and read Your Holy Scriptures, so they will recognize You have been with them every day and are ready to replace what is missing. This we pray in the name of Jesus the Christ, Your Son. Amen
Listen to this song: I'll Fly Away
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