Your Greatest Life: Overcoming Depression, Divorce and Critical Illness

This book is the story and journey of a very ordinary Christian woman, one who loves Jesus and believes His word and wants nothing more than to live for Him, a woman who has faith and speaks the word of God over her life.

Like many of you, I was doing all the right things, all the things I had been taught, but was not living in the victory I knew God wanted for me. Many of you, like I was, are wondering, What is wrong with me? Is there something about me that God is just not happy with? Why do I feel this way? This book may not be what you are expecting. It is very raw and honest, and it definitely does not contain churchy or Christianese phrases or canned pat answers. Can anyone be brave enough with me to admit we absolutely cannot stand that? I believe it contains real answers to very real and all too common problems in the body of Christ today that no one wants to admit or talk about. This is about real life, pressures, tests, decisions, and real consequences. There are hard issues dealt with here, those that will definitely challenge you, but I believe in you. You can handle this.

This book will make you laugh, cry, shout, dance, and maybe scream, but one thing I can tell you is that you will get answers. I have read a hundred self-help books, and the thing that makes this different is more the practical day-to-day how-to. I am a person who wants to know the process, not theory, and I am delivering this to you today. My prayer and desire is to help everyone who reads this book realize how much God loves them and that real victory is not only available to them but close within their reach. I had my first real encounter with the unconditional love of God when I was deep in the pit of depression and had given up on everything I had been taught to do to live a victorious and prosperous Christian life.

I had all the books, and I bet you do too: books like such-and-such steps to financial prosperity, how to keep the devil off your back, how to live in victory, ten things every Christian wife needs to know, and so on. There is a book on how to overcome every imaginable problem we may face. I am not knocking on these books and teachings. I am writing one right now. They are vital to our growth and maturity, and I am thankful for every anointed minister who shares their gifts in this way.

What many of us do not realize, however, is that there is no formula, no matter how good the book is. No one, two, three, and poof, you’ve arrived. There is only an honest and sincere heart of love and obedience before God and standing in and on His Word. During these times, many years ago, I believed I had been doing all of the very sound biblical principles I had been taught, and nothing ever went the way I thought it was supposed to. I was tithing but never getting ahead financially. I was submitting to and respecting my husband but never feeling like I was receiving the love I expected. I was continually putting the Word in my heart, confessing scripture over things I wanted in my life but never seeing them come to pass.

Years went by like this, and I became more and more discouraged and angry. I did not understand why God would do things for other people and not for me. Of course, when you are living as a discouraged and angry person, it tends to spill over into your relationships, especially your marriage. I had become a resentful, cynical, bitter, and offendable person, and as a result, my marriage was falling apart. There was a seed of bitterness toward my husband because, of course, I figured I was doing everything right. So it must be him.

Can anyone identify? This is just where the devil likes to find people. This is where he will start to whisper lies into your ear like, “God does not love you. You will never be good enough. It’s that spouse of yours.” or “You are a complete failure.” Sure enough, he came along whispering those things to me. I came to the point where I was so disheartened with God and what I thought He was that I literally yelled at Him, “I am not doing this anymore! If I have to jump through all these hoops and do everything perfect to get You to love me or do anything in my life, then I just give up.” And I did. I stopped confessing the Word and studying my Bible. I cut back on church attendance, and I talked to God with very raw honesty and bluntness only when I felt like it.

I have a bit of a spitfire personality, and if I get upset, I can get very spiteful. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and had to be a bit of a scrapper to get home from school in one piece a lot of the time. Because this was in me, a bit of that spiteful scrapper came out, and my thought process went a little like this, I’ve done everything right, and it’s not working. So I’m just going to do everything wrong. I still loved God but was very disappointed in Him, if you can imagine such a thing. I had been in a very dark and lonely place for a long time and really did not care if I lived or died.

I am being very honest here because I am certain there are those of you who feel or felt that way and would never admit it out loud. You might not even admit it to God. Let me encourage you with what I discovered through this time of doing everything wrong and being angry, depressed, bitter, and disappointed. The Spirit of God never once for a moment took His presence from me. I guess I expected that He would, but He never did. I remember being in my rebellious, “not giving a rip about anything” moments, and my thoughts would sometimes turn toward God. And a warm feeling would come over me. This continued on for a couple of years. Every time I would talk to God in my raw, blunt way, even with a glass of wine in my hand, His love would seep into me.

My lightning-fast mind finally caught up with my spirit after a while. God did not love me based on how much scripture I confessed or how much I tithed, attended church, prayed, or read my Bible. He just simply loved me. I was doing nothing for Him—and had not for a while—and He still loved me. I felt God’s love and presence more during this time than I had ever felt in my entire Christian walk—more than when I had been leading the prayer team and super kid program or teaching in the Bible school. Does this surprise you? Well, it sure did me. I had always been told, “God cares more about you than about what you do,” but I never really knew it until then.

Remember in the movie Avatar when the female character looks at Sully and says “I see you”? That’s how I felt with God at that time. I really saw Him. He is love. I was so excited when I found this in scripture too. Job said the same thing in Job 42:5 (TLB), “I have heard of you but now I see you.” None of us wants to go through the magnitude of trials I did, and I’m not saying we need to. If we do, however, what a reward to receive at the end. It’s life-changing. I really believe God would rather have honesty out of our hearts that is not pretty than false flattery for public show. Who do we think we are fooling anyway? He is a big God; He can handle it.

God sees your heart, and He can work with honesty. Looking back now, I realize all that effort in my own strength to please God and trying to get Him to do something for me was the whole problem. It was formulas and religious activity motivated in my benefit rather than a sincere heart of love. God cannot bless human effort, and I cannot earn His favor. He gave me His word to declare over my life as a gift because He loves me, not as a homework assignment to earn a gold star and a reward. I needed to have a revelation of the unconditional love of God just for me because I’m me. In my pit of despair, as ugly as it was, I got it.

This period changed my life forever because it changed the way I thought about, loved, looked at, and served God. I would love to be able to say that was it, that everything was rosy after that, but that was not so. I am very thankful that God did not give up on me during my wacky period and finally got through to me. He knew what I did not: I was about to face the fight of my life. I needed to know how much God loved me in order to survive the life-or-death challenge that came next. My journey involves three trials that are life-altering in themselves, but more often than not, one will lead to or be affected by the other. Once the enemy gets his foot in the door, he is relentless in his efforts to destroy every area of our lives. This is why we need to be wise to his tactics and resist him before he can gain any territory. “Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). “Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you” (Luke 10:19).

As I mentioned previously, my story starts with depression. That depression led to anger, bitterness, and strife, to the point where it led to a divorce. As many of you are aware, divorce itself can come with its own compounding depression, anger, hurt, guilt, bitterness, unforgiveness, and stress. If you let this go on for a few years unchecked, it can have devastating effects on your physical health. My perfect storm, along with depression and divorce, culminated with a diagnosis of multiple myeloma cancer in the terminal stage. Because you are reading this book, I am obviously still alive to tell the story.

My prayer and desire is to share with you what God has taught me in this storm and to convince you without a shadow of doubt that there is victory for you, no matter how deep in it you are. God is no respecter of persons, and I truly believe that now. The outline of this book will follow my journey as it happened to me. Please read through each section even if you have only experienced one or another of these in your life.

Topics will be interwoven, and there will be some repetition as one situation can and often does lead into another and can exist together. (If you are anything like me, it does not hurt to hear it twice.) It doesn’t always start with depression. It can start with a divorce, which leads to depression, which can lead to critical illness. It can start with critical illness, which can lead to depression and overwhelming stress, which can lead to divorce. I know these are heavy and meaty subjects, and I would not even attempt to address them if God had not only taken me through them but brought me out in such inner strength and victory that I could almost count it worth it. (I did say almost.) The devil and I have an understanding. He hates me, and I hate him. Remember that spiteful, scrapper, spitfire part of my personality I described previously? Since he did everything he could to try to destroy me, I have put him on notice that I will do everything I can for the rest of my life to bring deliverance to as many as possible by sharing what God has done for me and taught me. I will make him sorry he ever messed with me.

This is a book of encouragement. The things God taught me are practical and doable for ordinary Christians just like you and me. I just never saw it before. Start at the beginning, one day at a time. If you are reading this, chances are you are already in trouble, so this book will begin with dealing with depression. “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 1:2). Your soul is your mind, will, and emotions, the target of depression when it comes. When we start to heal our minds and emotions, it will naturally flow into and bring victory to all areas of life. “Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

My fellow warriors, let’s begin.