Stolen Years: Trusting Christ with Our Suffering
Editor’s Note: The following article highlights one mom’s journey through depression and isn’t intended to be prescriptive. We acknowledge that we all experience the effects of the fall in various ways and to varying degrees in our homes, and there is real grief that comes in not being there for our kids in the ways we want. Therefore, we encourage you to reach out to your local church and counselors or other professionals in your own community to speak to the specifics of your own situation.
For more on suffering and loss, check out our recommended resources here.
“Best to Bring Home to Mom.” This was the superlative emblazoned beneath my senior yearbook photo. I was never a “boy magnet” as a teenager, but I was cute, clean-cut, and well-respected for my dependability and kindness. Even if they couldn’t visualize me as “girlfriend material,” my classmates seemed to recognize my potential as future “wife and mother material,” at least in their moms’ eyes.
Even back then, I dreamed of someday becoming a stay-at-home mom, and my superlative seemed to confirm what I already believed about myself: that God had designed me to fulfill this destiny, and that I was going to be really good at it.
Six years later, I was newly married and expecting my first son—grateful to be on the precipice of the role for which God had been preparing me through years of hopeful prayer. I was confident my empathetic demeanor would offer my children a taste of their good Father’s love for them and that they therefore would become eager, fully-catechized disciples of Christ at a young age.
Then my son was born, and things began to change.
The cloud of postpartum depression crept in and cast a sinister shadow over my hope and confidence; I didn’t feel like the person I used to be. Soon, I again became pregnant and gave birth to our second son, and the darkness further consumed me. Then, a third pregnancy and a third son. My boys were beautiful; they were everything for which I could have hoped. But unrelenting depression was by now the only reality I knew, and it dug its insidious roots deep into the recesses of my heart.
At some point, when our youngest turned one and it no longer felt accurate to call my condition “postpartum” depression, I surrendered to what seemed inevitable: I would be stuck in the darkness indefinitely.
The depression took on new, terrifying forms. The damage wreaked on my heart and body was catastrophic. My illness threw our family’s life into chaos. I regularly called my husband begging him to come home from work because I felt so unhinged that I doubted my ability to care for my children with any semblance of composure. At my lowest point, I surrendered to a week of compulsory care in a psychiatric hospital.
From the time my first bout of postpartum depression appeared until God finally, miraculously restored my health and flooded my heart with the light I had so desperately missed, seven years had passed. And not just any seven years—the seven years I believed were most critical in forming my sons’ security in my love. To get these years back, to give my sons the time and investment I had desired so fervently for them—these chances were long gone, and I was heartbroken that I had failed my beloved children so severely.
Depression is one common blight on the hearts of young Christian mothers, surrounded by countless other forms of pain and suffering in this fallen world. Praise be to God that he calls those blessed who are “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3); we find unsurpassable comfort in our confidence that Christ can meet and minister to our hearts even in the “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). But what about the things that still get lost along the way?
Maybe we’re in the middle of chronic struggles, daily feeling our insufficiency for our kids. Or perhaps, like me, our internal worlds are finally bright, and for this we are grateful. But we look over our shoulders at the scorched earth we have left in our trail—the chaos, pain, and insecurity that affected not only us, but also our children. The grief for what we have forever lost—for how far we fell from our aspirations to be a composed and capable mother to our young children—haunts us.
If my children could articulate the effect that my depression had on their early years, I imagine them praying, “Lord, where were you? Why did you allow the person who was supposed to care for me most steadily to be swallowed up by debilitating despair?”
Does this question sound familiar? In John 11, Mary and Martha send word to Jesus that their brother Lazarus is ill, trusting that Jesus loves their family and that he is able to restore Lazarus to health. In their cultural context, Lazarus would have been the sole provider and advocate for his two unmarried sisters, so the situation was dire—not only for Lazarus, but for Mary and Martha as well. But Jesus tarries, and before he finally arrives, Lazarus dies. The sisters are understandably distraught, and Mary pleads before Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32).
As we know, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and while Scripture does not narrate Mary’s immediate response, in the following chapter we now see her anointing Jesus’s feet with expensive ointment, which Jesus recognizes as preparation for his burial.[1]
Something crucial has changed for Mary. In the process of losing her brother—her only source of earthly security—and then witnessing Jesus’s power over death, she finally understands the gospel: Christ has not come to give her what she thinks she needs—security within her biological family. Rather, Christ is the thing she needs. The forgiveness of her sins and the hope in an eternal life with Christ blows whatever comfort her brother could provide for her out of the water.
I pray that someday my children will understand my depression in these terms. Christ’s power has been made perfect in my weakness,[2] because through it, he has shown my children that everything they truly need may be found only in him.
Not all of us experience a miraculous healing like Lazarus in this lifetime. Maybe in God’s providence, the clouds remain and we don’t get released from our trials until eternity. But even then, dear sisters, he is able to restore “the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25). He is able to bridge the gaps for our families and, ultimately, redeem what our suffering has taken from us. Praise God that he works above and beyond what we have to offer to accomplish his good and perfect plans. He can redeem our suffering from curse to gift.
[1] John 12:1-7
[2] 2 Corinthians 12:9
