Great Happiness!

A group of us were talking about the meaning of names, and I said, “My friends are always asking me what my name means, but in English names don’t have meanings.  They’re just names.”  One girl said that she knew of a website where the meaning of names can be researched.  So she looked up my name, Alisa, and said, “Great happiness!  Your name means great happiness in Hebrew!”  All the other girls said, “Yeah that fits you!”

Now, that blows my mind because all my life I’ve had the opposite spoken over me.  I was born on a Wednesday, so I was told “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.”  I believed it!  Depression has been a plague and a curse on my family—one which I recently broke.  I have suffered a couple of bouts of depression so severe that I slept only 1 or 2 hours a night for almost 3 months, and had suicidal thoughts and even suicidal hallucinations.  The longest period of depression lasted about 2 ½ years.

Once during a bout of severe depression I saw a funny clip on America’s Funniest Home Videos.  I laughed so hard that I couldn’t stop.  Then I began crying just as hysterically, thinking that surely this is the last time I will ever laugh.  It really alarmed my family, who had no idea how to help me.

Another time I literally felt something inside of me break at an unkind remark that I would normally have shrugged off.  After that, I passed entire days looking out the window and crying.  The sight of a bird flying by was enough to start me crying.

I don’t like having to depend on medication, but Prozac probably saved my life.  It didn’t make my life less painful, but it cushioned the pain enough to help me keep a grip and not act on those bad thoughts.  To be honest, all that feels like it was another life, a different person.

Nevertheless, despite the depression and the bad stuff in my life, I have always been able to remain mostly upbeat and positive.  Perhaps that is because even without knowing it, whenever anyone said my name, they were proclaiming great happiness to me without even knowing it.  Now that’s a great thought!

And now that I have truly surrendered all to God, I do have great happiness.  I never would have thought it possible—at least not in this life.

And here’s a fun thought, inspired by 6 year old Dave Junior: logic and chocolate do not go together.  Chocolate is not a great anti-depressant (the calories are unfortunate), but it does help some.  God is good!

Bad News Comes, but Jesus is Still Good News!

I got an e-mail the other day saying that my lifelong friend had committed suicide.  He was a believer, but clearly must have been in a terrible personal crisis.  Nobody had any idea, but now that I think of it, he probably never got over his big brother’s death 30 years ago.  Not that any of us have gotten over that, either, but I think it affected Jim more profoundly than any of us had realized.  Looking back, I realize that’s probably why he drank.  I don’t remember him drinking to excess before Nick died.  And I think he just always felt inferior to Nick because Nick was loved by everyone.

I loved Jim, and even if I had never thought this through before, I know that I did show him lots of love.  My whole family did.  He often called my parents just to talk.  But I think that some wounds are just too deep for ordinary human love to heal.  But he had turned to drink instead of to God for comfort.

One thing I was led to do was to forgive him this last sin—after all, suicide is the sin you can’t repent from.  So I forgave him because Jesus said that the sins we forgive will be forgiven (John 20:22-23).  I think that it doesn’t occur to most people to forgive suicides.  After all, it’s such a selfish act that leaves everyone you love feeling beaten and broken and confused.

I am reading “Pursuing Holiness” by Jerry Bridges © 2006, Navpress.  Jim’s suicide proves to me that we can’t afford to simply rest in the holiness Jesus gave us when we called to Him.  We’ve got to work on ourselves.  And it occurred to me today that even though Jesus did the work of salvation long ago, our personal salvation required our cooperation (i.e., confession, repentance, and baptism).  So it makes sense that our spiritual walk requires us to continue to surrender, cooperate, and yield to God as He molds us into the kind of vessels that He can use.   As with anything worthwhile in this life, you get out of it whatever you put into it.  Jesus said that troubles come to us all, but if we’re close to Him, He shields us from things that could potentially destroy us.

Thanks for letting me ramble.  This is just so hard!  But God is still good!  Please pray for Jim’s wife, children, mother, and sisters.