Joy

Depression can make you want to crawl in to the laps of stone goddesses and it would feel like bed.
It's almost like a museum of sorts--where in an hour you can travel to Greece and then to a room in Frank Lloyd Wright's home and like your legs are always falling asleep...like you have an umbrella open against your thigh in the rain...but only when no one is looking.
It's a hard thing to understand because perhaps it's the most honest a person can be without helping it.
Words act as life preservers; little Styrofoam hearts sending "happy" out.
An incessant rain makes it feel like maybe that's the reason the day is not working, or maybe the reason you are not working...or maybe like the rain is the only thing that is working in the whole entire world.
December, January February...not every day has to be February.
And
Today
Is
March.

In the past few years the winter has not been so daunting, for which I am grateful.
It's not feeling sorry for yourself. You don't feel yourself, at all, actually.
And you can't just turn a mind off that never sleeps. It thinks you.

I find it easiest to judge others when I am...losing to February. But the truth is that my bathroom can be cleaner than the condition of my heart if I'm not sincere about keeping it clean...even in February. Lies come at you from everywhere, in every sense of the word. Once you believe the lie, it becomes your worldview. Once your worldview starts at the dead end lie your thoughts will only reiterate the place where they began...the lie.
"I am alone."
-something happens that feels-
"No one would understand this feeling."
So where are we now? ALONE.
Lame example, but you get the idea.

Sometimes you have to fight for what's true; and, that makes being tired so worth it. Joy is not a feeling. Joy is a gift that comes when you bring a sword for peace, it's a gift that comes with rest.

I learned, the hard way (almost always) that there is never a reason to be unkind. Not. Ever. Not even if "they did it first." Not even if I do not feel good. You see, meekness is power under control.
I also learned that just because something is true does not mean it's necessary to say.
1) Is it true?
2) Is it necessary?
3) Is it kind?

I have learned to be thankful for times of "winter" because it is a time where I am guaranteed to remember I cannot CANNOT do life based on my own merit or strength. I am relieved, more than any other time, that Jesus loves me.
I am not a victim of the cold. In 2002 I looked at the bare trees and it seemed to me they were raising their hands to God for morning, for sun, for tomorrow...and I decided that I should do the same.
Depression does not have to be train travel
from a nowhere land
to a place that
exists even less.
It does not have to claim a song
that stays in your
heart--sad.
It does not have to be weather that is
pounding inside somewhere
like pounding on the
piano
madly
inside of an object that
is pounding
madly inside of you.

You don't have to keep your eyes fixed on that place in the ceiling where it's slightly uneven.