Dear God,
Man oh man is there is a lot of doom and gloom in Luke’s Gospel reading for today (Luke 21:5-19). I thought I had my anxiety under control until I read the part where Jesus said, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.”
After that happy thought comes this one: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues from place to place.”
But before that party happens, we get “seized” and “persecuted” and “handed over to synagogues and prisons.”
Now God, you know I have my own Armageddon going on inside this bipolar brain most of the time. Why all the fodder for anxiety? Is Pfizer giving you a percentage of its Xanax sales?
I did manage to find a consoling phrase following the part that says “You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death.” Here it is: “BY YOUR PERSEVERANCE YOU WILL SECURE YOUR LIVES.”
Yah! That’s good news on most days. (Bad news on the suicidal ones.)
It always boils down to perseverance.
With faith. With marriage. With parenting (if done without violence). With my profession, or ministry, as I like to call it. And most certainly with trying to live outside the Black Hole.
Perseverance, more than anything else, secures the life of a depressive.

Because if we gave into our thoughts and our desperation, then the suicide rate in the United States would be more than 30,000 annual deaths, as it is now.
If those of us suffering from mental illness didn’t persevere every single minute of our lives, save those Foldger’s coffee moments with Hershey’s dark chocolate bars—and especially in those hours when our Darkness says that the only repose lies in death—then you can better believe that suicide would be the FIRST, not second-leading cause of death worldwide (as it is today) among women between the ages of 15 and 44, and fourth among men in that same age bracket, after road accidents, TB, and violence.
If we with faulty circuitry in the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex regions of the brain didn’t repeat to ourselves over and over and over again like Barney, the mentally handicapped purple dinosaur, that “it will pass” and “ignore that thought” and “it’s your depression talking,” then many, many more than 15 percent (today’s statistic) of those treated for severe depression would kill themselves.
If those of us with strained nerve circuits, the lucky folks experiencing a power outage the size of Manhattan in the part of the brain responsible for feeling peachy, if we didn’t imagine ourselves like the goofy blue engine chugging up the hill … “I think I can … I think I can … I think I can” until it accidentally plows over Barney on the other side, then suicide would be the first- or second-leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds, instead of the third-leading cause that it is today in that age group.
“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another,” wrote Walter Elliott, the late Catholic priest and missionary.
Winston Churchill repeated to himself the same sentiment. He kept a note card with this quote on his desk to keep him going, to empower himself against the constant battle with his “black dog,” a debilitating darkness that stalked him to his end:

The heights of great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upwards in the night.

I love that quote. And I say it so often when I’m feeling defeated against this illness of mine. My literary agent, who has become a friend of mine because she’s a wonderful person and also because I suck at boundaries, sent it to me on August 3, 2005, when I wanted to die in the worst possible way.
I couldn’t even enjoy chocolate. Need I say more?
I’m not sure what happened. All I know is that I don’t want to die anymore. And I think it had something to do with finding an excellent doctor—the shrink who doped me up on four kinds of antipsychotics and tranquilizers didn’t help things, or the geriatric psychiatrist who diagnosed me with ADHD—faith in you, hard work (diet, exercise, sleep, and the other boring things), and a TON of perseverance.
Perseverance and you, God, secured my life.
Perseverance means placing that leg, the one that hasn’t been shaved for a month because you don’t give a crap if someone mistakes you for your husband, on the floor when in it’s time to get up in the morning, when you really don’t see what the point of rising from your bed is if you fail at everything you do anyway.
Perseverance is trusting that the voice you hear most of the time–“You’re ugly, fat, stupid, selfish, lazy, and every other antonym of every basic virtue”—belongs to a grumpy criminal that’s bored in jail and wants free rent in your head.
Perseverance is ignoring that inaccurate opinion—two index fingers in the ears … “I can’t hear you!!!”—until you are able to discern the faint murmurings of your real self again, the chick who admits to many weaknesses but believes there is hope at becoming virtuous, not its antonym.
Perseverance, on the most basic level, God, is not taking your own life, even though every organ, muscle, and blacked-out system of your body begs you to.
Perseverance means believing that you, God, are good, on the days it appears otherwise, no offense. It’s waiting and waiting and waiting some more to feel better, until you do. And it’s listing all of your blessings and gifts—laying them on your table, God, and thanking you for them—even though the gratitude isn’t sincere.
Perseverance means arming your brain with the right weapons (medication, sleep, diet, exercise, light, friendship, service, faith) in its constant fight against darkness and despair, and not stopping until there is peace.
Yes, by perseverance and your help, we, depressives, secure our lives.