What’s Your Life Worth?
Posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
Battling the Blues?
I know Christians who never seem to get down, feel depressed or battle the blues.
I’m not one of them.
Neither is one of my best friends. Like me, Kevin is almost always ready to wander into the shadowy world of melancholy. Whenever his wife sees him slipping into the abyss of despair, she asks him, ”Kevin, are you getting depressed?”
His answer is classic: “No, but I’m thinking about it.”
That’s just how it is, isn’t it? Life seems overwhelming, we’re worn out, everything seems meaningless, and we start “thinking about” getting depressed.
I’m Thinking About It!
That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m thinking about getting depressed. And I have a lot of good reasons:
First, there’s my disease. I’m sick of being sick—of running back and forth to the doctors, of taking a bucket of expensive medication weekly, of the endless creams and ointments I rub on my skin that ruin my clothes.
Second, my schedule is insane. When I open my computer and look at all the appointments, commitments, and demands over the next weeks and months, I just want to throw up my hands and say, “Forget it, this is humanly impossible. I never get a break!”
Finally, everything in my life isn’t fitting together nicely. In fact, some problems seem like they’re never going to go away. A few people have let me down lately, and worse, more than a few have told me—well not me, but someone they knew would tell me—that I have let them down.
And as if I needed more reasons to feel depression knocking on the door—the sprinklers aren’t working right at home, we had a few glitches in our services on Sunday, and I can’t find the time to get my wife’s car to the body shop for some much needed repairs.
Oh and did I say that I’m just getting started? Really, I have a lot of reasons to be depressed and frankly, I may just quit thinking about getting depressed and just go ahead and be depressed.
My Life is Worth Something
Ever feel like that?
Well, if you do, try doing what I did . . . read these words from the Apostle Paul: “But my life is worth nothing unless I use it for doing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus—the work of telling others the Good News about God’s wonderful kindness and love” (Acts 20:24, NLT).
Taking Paul’s words to heart, I realized that this must mean when I feel like my life is worth nothing, God thinks my life is worth something — if I’m using it to do what He told me to do.
I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes last week, and I know I sinned some (maybe even a lot!). But I also know that one of the main reasons I’m so weary this morning is because I spent myself doing what He told me to do—the work of telling others the Good News about God’s wonderful kindness and love.
I’m still thinking about it—about getting depressed today. But I’m thinking about it a little less every time I remember that God is using me—melancholy Ed—to get some things done that are eternally important.
It’s one of the greatest benefits of being a disciple of the Lord Jesus: In spite of all our shortcomings, all our problems, all our failures, everything’s that’s wrong in our life, and all of our pathologies, if we are about our Father’s business, every day is a “something” day—a day that means a lot to Him.
