Black Dog Days

I am a fan of Winston Churchill. He’s one of my favorite historical figures. I also love him because, like me, he wrestled with Black Dog days.

Do you know the Black Dog?

The same man who famously said “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” Or “Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.” This same man wrestled with bouts of depression, deep inner darkness that threatened to consume him, Black Dog days.

There’s nothing glorious about depression. It arrives, unbidden, and remains to occupy one’s soul like a distant, unpleasant houseguest, selfishly consuming one’s store of resources for days on end.

So where is God when the darkness descends, when the Black Dog arrives, howling at the moon?

King David wrestled with the darkness of the soul. He who Scripture describes as a “man after God’s own heart” wrote “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” Ps 10:1 and “My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, ‘Where is you God?’” Ps 42:3 and again “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?” Psalm 42:5.

David’s sorrows and bouts of sadness weave through the Psalms like a scarlet cord he drops from his window to remind God to rescue Him when He will. And He does.

Psalm 13 begins with these words “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?” but the same Psalm ends with these words “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.”

There were others in Scripture and throughout church history who have wrestled with the darkness of the soul. Periods of depression are not a sign that you do not know God nor are they a sign that you do not have faith. I’m not sure what they are but they are not that.

I do know that when the Black Dog arrives, he isolates me from others. Like a prisoner of war cast into solitary confinement, I do not enjoy the sweet fellowship of others even when I am in their midst.

So I turn to the written page – just as David did with his Psalms, just as Churchill did with is painting and his writing, just as others have done – I write out my darkness, I spell out my fears, I compose my sorrow into prose much like prisoners in isolation scratch notes onto the walls or tap out code to those in the neighboring cell – the sound of my keyboard like the desperate tapping of one seeking company even in the darkness of her confinement, the scratching of my pen like those who mark the days using the ends of charred sticks upon the wall.

I believe that when Christians face trials of all kinds there is a purpose – not the least of which is to carry a message back from the darkness that we have been there and prevailed through God’s mercy and grace. So that we can echo the words of Corrie Ten Boom who survived a Nazi concentration camp that “There is no pit so deep that the Presence of God is not there with us.”

The Black Dog may win the day but in the long haul, the eternal one, he does not prevail against the Hound of Heaven.