The Great Depression

One of the problems I have in telling my story is that people expect the following general pattern: there’s something that needs fixing, God turns up and does a miracle, we all live happily ever after. But that’s not what happened, and that puzzles people because things aren’t supposed to happen like they did; not if God’s really God, at any rate. But then, things often don’t happen the way they are supposed to, if we are truthful with ourselves. Jesus himself is a classic example of this. The Jews expected a hero who would eject the Romans from the promised land, but instead he ended up running roughshod over their extended version of the law and getting crucified for it. Also, when he was baptised a voice of approval boomed out of heaven, yet he went immediately on to 6 weeks of near starvation and gruelling testing; perhaps not the way we would have arranged things.

From one perspective, you could say I’m lucky to still be alive today (or you could say my wife and family are the lucky ones). On the other hand, you could take the view that God cared too much to let me to bow out at that stage. In actual fact, I had two very narrow escapes with death in the summer of 1976, although I wasn’t aware of that at the time. In the first we were passing through a narrow channel between the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling off the north Dutch coast (in a yacht) in a very short steep sea – the remnants of recent gales. I was in the bows “resting” and we came very close to hitting a buoy (because we could only see the channel marker buoys when both we and they were on the top of a wave). If we had hit it, the cabin would have been flooded in no time and I would not have been able to escape. The other incident was on the way back in a light aircraft, when the pilot suddenly banked very steeply and another aircraft (at the same altitude and not banking) passed head-on within 100 feet of us. If he had not banked when he did, there would have been a mid-air collision with no possibility of survivors. It makes you think.

I have heard many views of depression, it’s causes and what can be done about it, and what is written here is at odds with many of them. It is thus inevitably controversial and goes against what many medical professionals would say (including Christian ones); but I’m telling things as they were, how I saw and see them, and how I came out of it. So you can draw your own conclusions.