I have occasionally engaged in a simple but sometimes devastating introspective exercise, one of looking inside to see what is there — not guts but self. The end result I look for is a set of images of or words about what I find in there. In order to describe fully how I go about this I would need first to have some sort of professional qualification and the means and will to look after anyone who might follow my instructions. And I can’t just willy-nilly recommend this sort of thing to any and all, because, like I said, it can be devastating, and I can’t know your ability to dust yourself off and proceed with your day.
     What I find with this exercise, that end result, changes from one time to the next, but I’ve been at this long enough that whatever I find is likely to be slight variations of what I have seen on earlier occasions. I’ve come to know, for instance, a set of images of depression. These are okay and unsurprising when you see them in print, but when you find out about them by seeing them in your innards, they can be a lot more interesting:

• darkness
• unrootedness or uprootedness
• weakness, inability to move
• ignorance, confusion, feeling unsure of anything
• feeling hemmed in
• a sense of being empty at the core, a house where no one lives, where the demons have free range and have evicted or restrained the owner
• poverty
• “no one’s lives here,” “there’s no one here”
• vast empty space
• none of this is connected with other people
• no fully felt feelings

There is some repetition in the list, mainly because it would take too much space to describe the shades of difference. I know this list well, but it is not all I have. It is not the one consistent pattern from one day to the next, from one decade to the next. Even just in my innards, it has a broader context.
     There is also a broader context in the sense that that set of images is recognized, received, and relativized by a broader spectrum of human experience in the Bible. The Bible is open to human experiences, including both abandonment and the sense  or imagery  of abandonment that can come with depression. It encourages us to talk about those things, even to shake a fist at God when that seems appropriate.
     The Bible’s openness to such things stands in sharp, bold, and (dare I use the word again?) devastating contrast to much of what is taught and preached as Christianity. That might not always be a bad thing: there are those who have come to love the Bible because it is so different from what they have heard in sermons.
     But I said above that the Bible also relativizes expressions of depression by including it in a broader spectrum of human experience. I should cut to the chase here and tell about my discovery that Ephesians 3:14-19 seems to respond directly to the list of images I have given above:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fulness of God. (RSV)