Conversation with God. David C. Wilson

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      Conversation with God

      A Christian Experience of Depression

      David C. Wilson

      Conversation with God

      A Christian Experience of Depression

      Copyright © 2020 David C. Wilson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Wipf & Stock

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-6704-6

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-6705-3

      ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-6706-0

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/19/20

      For Trish, now safe with her Lord, who ‘prophesied’ the writing of this book.

      Preface

      This book is about depression, which most people—if they think about it at all—consider it to be a medical condition treatable with modern drugs, and the medical analogy that underpins this viewpoint compares the diabetic’s pancreas with the depressive’s brain. The pancreas and the brain are just different organs of the body where, in the one case (diabetes) there is a shortage of insulin, and in the other (depression) a shortage of a different set of chemicals called neurotransmitters. Fix the shortage and the problem disappears, simple isn’t it! The problem is, however, compounded by the ‘psychosis’ that appears to be the end result of certain experiences of depression, and which can lead to a person ‘hearing voices,’ or worse, ‘seeing voices.’ Psychosis may be seen as just one side of a coin the other side of which is mysticism, and surprisingly, ‘seeing voices’ is an entirely biblical experience (see chapter 12), but it usually fails to be translated as such because it does not make sense to us. In our post-modern, Western, biomedical world-view ‘seeing voices’ simply ‘does not compute.’ Although of necessity this book is to some extent autobiographical, my intention in writing it has been to bring these other features of depression to the attention of Christians, features that appear to be a wasted resource in our walk of faith. To a large extent Christians ‘buy into’ the secular world-view in which depression is often misunderstood as something from which the afflicted person “can snap out of.” Perhaps, instead of pressing depressives to “pull themselves together,” Christians should utilise them as a valuable resource in our corporate communication with God. But to do this raises serious questions concerning the current practices of our faith.

      1

      Thatcher’s Children

      As a child I used to love stories, listening avidly to the Greek legends read to us at primary school and also to the Old Testament bible stories at the Baptist Sunday school I attended until the age of ten. At about that age I discovered temptation, when under the influence of ‘friends,’ I began to duck out of Sunday school, deciding instead to spend the threepence collection money on liquorice at the nearby herbalist shop. From that point on, and for a further thirty six years, I rarely graced the inside of a church building—save for births, marriages, and deaths, that is, the ‘normal’ and socially-required rites of passage. I set out on the great adventure of life becoming ever more determined to do exactly as I pleased but taking a long time to learn that life, or so it seemed, merely consisted of mutual, short-term reciprocity. One simply performed an appropriate number of transactions with other members of society in order to achieve one’s desired goals, and the efficiency of this process determined the amount of success met with. Whilst inwardly accepting that this was the ‘way the world worked,’ I singularly failed to make the system work for me. For one thing, I enjoyed science and chose to begin work in manufacturing industry during the labor governments of the nineteen sixties, and Harold Wilson seemed to sum up my entire belief-system in his promise to bring about a “white hot technological revolution.” The reality of course has been different, and in the post modern, post industrial society of today, the manufacturing sector has shrunk to perhaps a tenth of its previous size.

      Having eventually qualified as a Chemist, however, I found I had other life-affecting problems, not least my impeccable timing, for I had managed to qualify during a major manufacturing recession. Finding a job when whole research departments are being closed is difficult to say the least, so I decided to train as a teacher, without it seems realising that those same redundant chemists were all doing the very same thing. It should have come as no surprise to find teaching posts in short supply when I began to apply for them twelve months later. The need to take stock of the situation pressed in upon me. I realized that I had spent fourteen years doing the wrong things at the wrong time, and the question which now arose was, should I add to my problems by seeking a teaching post in the wrong place? Being from the north west of England I was loath to uproot the four of us (for I had married and now had a wife and children to consider) and move to Hackney or the nether reaches of Glamorgan in order to teach. For the first time in my life I was compelled to reflect on ‘the quality of life’—for want of a better phrase, and to decide in discussion with my wife, the direction our lives should take from now on.

      Bereft

      Now I was qualified to teach in schools, although I had been trained as a teacher of chemistry in further education, and it was a post in a college of further education or technology which I ideally sought. In the absence of such a post, the choice presented became one between teaching in a secondary school which might perhaps be at the other end of the country, or making a complete career break. I looked around for inspiration and saw what I thought was my salvation—I became an insurance agent! The attractions of this work for me lay in the relative freedoms it provided, since each working day comprised of a series of meetings with ordinary people during which I looked after their insurance needs and collected their premiums. No longer would I be trapped inside large organisations where advancement depended so much upon the interpersonal politics of the company or department, and with which I had so little facility. Instead I would be free, almost my own boss, and in my naivety I believed I had escaped the system–the enslaving matrix. As if to emphasize the irrevocable nature of this complete change of career, three days after accepting the insurance job I was offered sixteen teaching hours in a college of technology in south Manchester. Now sixteen hours is not a full post, it’s about two thirds of a post and I was worried about the salary being enough, so I declined what would almost certainly have been ‘a foot in the door.’ Besides, there were other compelling reasons to remain an insurance agent. Firstly, the new job involved working out of an office in a town in East Cheshire, which was just far enough away from our home in Greater Manchester to qualify for financial assistance from the government towards removal expenses under a then current scheme. Secondly, and most importantly, the new employer was in financial services, and as such, offered discounted mortgages to its staff. This was vitally important because it permitted us to cross the North Manchester—South Manchester financial ‘apartheid,’ which normally prevented such movement. In other words, one normally needed a much higher salary, in order to migrate from the gloomy, industrial north to buy the more expensive houses of the leafy suburbs of South Manchester—or better still the towns and villages of East Cheshire. The net result was that I had contrived and manipulated my way into the ‘good life’ and I remained an insurance agent, going on to discover some very revealing things about both myself and the ‘world’ I thought I knew.

      In the pre regulation Britain of the late nineteen-seventies it was possible to reply to an advertizement—usually one column-inch in length—in the local newspaper and get a job as an industrial branch, insurance agent without qualifications or experience of any kind in this work. As the name suggests the work involved the selling of life insurance to the ‘industrial’ or working