Remaining Steadfast Through Seasons of Depression Pt. 1

Depression is something I am, unfortunately, intimately familiar with. And what really gets me is that it always seems to live in my hip pocket when good things are getting ready to happen. (Something like a NEW BOOK releasing TODAY, maybe?!) It seems like the lies of the enemy get louder when life feels like it’s going pretty well.

As a Christian, when depression hits and sits heavily on me for days, weeks, or even months, it’s easy for me to feel like I’m failing at life. Even my prayers become lists of my failures or spiritual characteristics I lack. I very quickly get caught up in all the things I feel like I’m missing out on, all the things I can’t seem to do, and all the ways I think I should be stronger by now.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m walking through a time when my heart is heavy and doing everyday tasks sometimes feels impossible. Each time it hits, I have to decide how I’m going to navigate through it.

For a long time, my first instinct was to fight it. Fight the sadness and the lethargy, push through the heaviness, deny the shame, and ignore the fog—until I couldn’t anymore.

Years ago, I was talking about depression with a friend, and she gave me the strangest piece of advice. She told me not to fight it, but to ride through it with God at my side. When she said it, it felt wrong. I heard it as if she was encouraging me to embrace and welcome the depression.

But later I realized she didn’t mean I should surrender to depression as if it had the final say. She meant I should stop denying that depression existed and stop trying to force myself to feel and act ‘normal’ or happy.

Ignoring depression and forcing myself to act normal only made it hang on longer because I couldn’t make myself ‘get over it.’ The only true way to heal and move through it, is to acknowledge it exists. Not to claim it as a permanent residence, but to admit what I’m feeling is real and valid.

When I told my husband how I felt this time, he said almost the same thing, and his encouragement was freeing. His words let me know it was safe to admit to him that I was struggling. I knew he would listen and not try to talk me out of it or explain why my feelings weren’t logical.

That kind of safety is so important because when depression hits, often times what we need most isn’t someone to correct our feelings. What we need is someone safe enough to sit with us while we tell the truth.

Depression Isn’t Proof Your Faith Has Failed

One of the biggest lies depression tells me is that if I were really faithful, I wouldn’t feel this way.

The accusations sound something like:

• If you were really walking closely with the Lord, you wouldn’t feel so numb, heavy, isolated, or exhausted.

• No one understands or cares how you feel because you’re too much—or not enough.

And those thoughts don’t stay neatly contained in my human relationships. They bleed into my relationship with God too, and I recite my own list of condemnations.

• I failed Him by doing the same sin—again.

• I haven’t spent enough time in prayer, but until I make things right, He can’t or won’t listen to me.

• By the time I do, I’m too embarrassed and ashamed to come to Him and admit what I did—even though He already knows.

That’s when my prayers become lists of failures and lack. I come to God with my head bowed—not in reverence, but in shame. I start confessing the same things, apologizing for the same weaknesses, and assuming He is just as tired of me as I am of myself.

But that’s not the story Scripture tells.

The Bible doesn’t present suffering as evidence that God has abandoned His people. It doesn’t pretend faithful people never feel this kind of despair. In fact, many of the most important people in Scripture walked through seasons of intense sorrow, fear, grief, weariness, and emotional collapse.

• Elijah was so exhausted and afraid that he sat under a broom tree and asked God to take his life.

• David poured out his anguish in the Psalms and asked God how long He would hide His face.

• Paul wrote honestly about being afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down.

• Naomi was so overcome by grief and loss that she asked the women around her not to call her Naomi anymore, but Mara, because she believed the Almighty had dealt bitterly with her.

• And Jesus Himself was described as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

Their stories don’t teach us that depression is failure. They teach us that God is with us in the middle of suffering and that our despair doesn’t disqualify us from being loved by God. These stories remind us that when God’s people are weak, He doesn’t turn away in disgust. He draws even closer.

Sometimes He sends angels, encourages food and rest, or He sends a friend to speak a reminder of truth. But every time, He stays right beside us.

Naomi, Mara, and the Loss of Identity

Maybe it’s because I just wrote an entire novel based on the book of Ruth, but Naomi’s story has become especially meaningful to me in these times because her loss was profound. She lost her husband and both of her sons, which meant her entire livelihood was gone. In her culture, without a man to care for her and protect her, she had truly lost her identity and her tie to her people.

When she returned to Bethlehem after losing everything, she didn’t feel like ‘Naomi’ anymore. Naomi means pleasant. She told the women not to call her Naomi, but to instead call her ‘Mara.’ Mara means bitter, and she was communicating that she had gone from having a pleasant identity to a bitter one.

That resonated with me, because she let her losses become her identity. Naomi was not simply saying she felt bitter. She was identifying herself by her bitterness. Her grief had become so overwhelming that she renamed herself according to her pain.

I understand that temptation because my depression tries to rename me too.

Burden.

Failure.

Forgotten.

Alone.

It tries to convince me that my pain is my identity and that my worst thoughts are the truth. It tells me that what I feel is more reliable than what God has said. That’s why the line between acknowledging how I feel and setting up residence has to be carefully guarded.

But the beautiful thing about Naomi’s story is that while she couldn’t see redemption, God was already moving.

Ruth was beside her.

Boaz was ahead of her.

Provision was waiting in an ordinary field, and redemption unfolded through small, faithful steps.

Naomi couldn’t see the whole story from the place where she stood. All she could see was loss, but her limited view didn’t limit God’s work, and that gives me hope.

Because neither does my limited view.

When depression hits, I can’t always see what God is doing, and I can’t always imagine a future beyond the heaviness in front of me. But my inability to see God’s provision doesn’t mean He’s stopped providing, and my inability to hold myself together doesn’t mean He is disappointed in me.

When Depression Turns Everything Inward

For me, that feeling of everyone being disappointed in me drives my depression even deeper and steals my sense of worth and value.

That makes it hard to want to connect with anyone, including God. At my worst moments, and in the darkest seasons, all I want to do is make myself small. I isolate. I withdraw. I pull inward.

Depression tells me I’m a problem other people have to deal with.

My fault. My problem. My weakness. My ineptitude.

My mind replays awkward conversations, mistakes from days or years ago, and rejections and dismissals from other people—real or imagined. It tells me I don’t matter. Or worse, that I’m the source of the problem.

And when my mind is that loud, all I want to do is quit everything.

Sleeping, scrolling, and shutting out the world seems easier.

Honestly, there are times when I give myself permission to do those things for a little while. Sometimes my body and mind need to disconnect for a moment. Sometimes I need to admit I’m tired instead of pretending I’m fine, and allowing myself one day to shut down is not the end of the world.

But I also know that going multiple days, or spending hours for multiple days sleeping or scrolling only deepens the guilt. I know I still need to take care of my body, that I need to be present for my husband, and ultimately, I know numbing can become its own kind of trap.

Rest restores. Numbing avoids. Depression blurs the line between the two.

The Act of Remaining Steadfast Is Smaller Than We Think

When I hear the phrase “remaining steadfast,” I used to think it meant being strong, disciplined, and immovable. But my years of walking through seasons of depression has taught me something different. Remaining steadfast doesn’t mean you never doubt or question. It means you believe God is the source of truth—not what you see with your eyes.

Being steadfast that way doesn’t always look impressive or overtly spiritual.

Physically and outwardly, it might look like taking a nap, canceling plans, or scaling back what I thought I would accomplish, and letting some things go undone without feeling guilty. It’s often journaling in bullet points and choppy sentences instead of paragraphs and prose, or painting while listening to podcasts or an audiobook. It looks a lot like going slowly on purpose while continuing to do what I know to do, even if it’s less intense or takes longer to accomplish.

Inwardly, it means remembering that when I’m weak, God is still strong. It’s reminding myself that when I’m struggling, God knows exactly what I’m feeling, and He wants me to come to Him with it first.

Not after I fix it, make sense of it, or become more spiritual about it.

I go to Him first.

That’s because remaining steadfast isn’t about the actions I take. It’s where my focus is.

When I open my prayer journal and write ugly, honest prayers, I remember God can handle my mess. When I copy Scripture verses about who God is, I remember my emotions are not the highest authority. When I read the greetings in Paul’s letters, I remember how often God’s people need to be reminded who they are. When I say out loud who God is—the Creator of heaven and earth, the King of Kings, the Lord of all creation—I lift my eyes above the fog.

Not because the fog instantly disappears, but because God is above it.

Closing Thought

If depression has made you feel like a failure, I want you to know your struggle is not proof that your faith is false or weak.

You are not less loved because you’re tired, less faithful because you’re hurting, or beyond God’s reach because you feel numb.

When the fog is thick, remaining steadfast may look much smaller than you expected. It may look like telling the truth and admitting to someone safe that you’re struggling. It may look like one honest prayer, one small act of care, one slow step toward God.

This is where the next part begins: learning what it means to fix our minds on things above when depression makes everything feel heavy here below.

Phoenix logo, Always Hope, Michelle Bolanger

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