My church, City of Life, is on a 21-day Daniel fast. If you’re not familiar with a Daniel fast, it’s basically patterned after what Daniel did in the um, book of Daniel. Daniel. Daniel Daniel Daniel. (just a few more for good measure).

It involves a diet basically composed of things that grow from the ground – vegetables, fruit, beans, and the like. No sweeteners, no chemicals, no MEAT. Listen, I’m a huge fan of the Circle of Life. Somewhere, a beautiful cow ate some green, green grass that grew from the earth so it could meet its destiny as a medium-rare, perfectly-crusted slab of prime rib on my plate (extra horseradish on the side, please). But animals aren’t allowed as a part of this fast.

Fasting is biblical, and it should be a part of our regular spiritual disciplines as Christians. Something about fasting elevates you to a different level with God. Your spirit hears Him more clearly. By denying yourself the comforts of the food you enjoy, by embracing physical weakness, you experience greater power and strength in your spirit man. Your ministry can even be more effective. Fasting involves mourning – mourning our own weakness and sin, mourning the gap that exists between what we should be experiencing in Christ but aren’t, and reaching and pursuing the filling of that gap.

With our entire church on a 21-day fast seeking God for awakening, I should be singing kum-ba-ya and living in the glory realm, right?  But can I confess something?

Fasting rarely EVER feels spiritual to me.

At least not at first.  This is day 4 of our fast. This is not my first go-around with a Daniel fast, or other types of fasting, so I’m familiar with the feelings of that I’m experiencing right now. I’ve felt this before. My emotions are raw. All types of ugly thoughts have risen to the surface over the last few days, thoughts that I’m continually having to offer to the Lord. There are a lot of questions I’ve been asking, confusion that’s tried to take root in my life.

When you feel this way, especially during a time of consecration like a fast, it can be tempting to throw in the towel. Lord, I’m doing this for you! This should be easier! or I’ve tried it, I’m struggling, I must be doing something wrong. Pass the chips.  When all that fasting brings out of you is really ugly stuff, stuff that you can usually surpress JUST FINE while eating pizza, then you question what the whole point is.

But if your emotions are raw, if you’re tired, or if you’re waging an inner battle during your fast, I think you may actually be doing something right. God wants to refine you and deal with the issues in your heart that you normally suppress through entertainment, distraction, food, and more. He’s using this time to bring stuff to the surface and heal, restore, and change you so that you can experience greater intimacy with Him, with less “junk” between the two of you.

Another thing you might face as you fast is an extreme sense of discontent. For the past four days, although I’ve eaten my fill of beans, brown rice, fruit, veggies, hummus, and the like, I’ve had this burning, yearning feeling in my stomach. It doesn’t make sense. My stomach is full. But there is a dissatisfaction there that keeps whispering “You could fix this whole thing by just having some candy [or: chocolate, potato chips, cheeseburger, etc].”

Every time I hear that voice, I stop. Chocolate, potato chips, and cheeseburgers aren’t the answer, and while they probably will bring a shallow amount of satisfaction to that hunger, they aren’t the solution to the real issue. That discontent is, at its core, my tendency to replace my need and desire for the presence of God in my life with other stuff. Believers are supposed to live hungry. That physical lack of satisfaction is symbolic of a deeper spiritual dissatisfaction that ONLY intimacy with Jesus Christ can satiate.

If you’re like me and fasting doesn’t make you feel spiritual right away, then take heart. Don’t give up. God is working some things out in you, and in order to do that, we need to take away the props that keep us from dealing with areas or lack of love for Him. Keep at it.  I promise, as you stick with it, you’ll experience a shift in your spiritual life as you let the rawness of your emotions remind you of how he’s using this time to work on some of your frayed edges. Let the hunger remind you to crave His presence, to live hungry before Him, for Him.

This is the second part in a two-part post. To read part 1, click here.

……………

Christian counseling alleviated some of the pressure that I felt internally, yet I still experienced depression on a regular basis. Those of you who have experienced this know how your mood follows your thoughts. When your thoughts go down, so does your mood, until you’re in so deep that you can’t find a way to keep your head above the water. It brings to mind that scene in The Princess Bride where Westley gets stuck in quicksand in the fireswamp and has to take huge breaths of air when his head is above the surface to keep alive as he sinks under the suffocating sand.

You might think, “Well why not just think good thoughts so your mood goes up?” This seems a simple solution to a person who isn’t depressed, but to a person who is, it’s so difficult to scrape together one hope-filled thought that you might as well ask them to count to infinity. It’s just impossible.

One of the things I learned in counseling was to prioritize my inner life. That meant that everything in my life had to be an outflow of my relationship with Jesus. Jesus was first, everything else was secondary. As I reordered my private world, I found my depression lessening. I gave God His rightful place on the throne my life, and saw joy return little by little.

On August 24, 2011, we had a great Wednesday night service at City of Life, like we usually do. Great worship, great teaching… it was just great. But at the end, something special happened. Our entire worship team returned to the stage for the last part of the service, and we sang a song to close out the evening. However, we kept going. Past 8:30 (our usual dismissal time), past 8:45, past 9:00. Most everyone had left and there were only a handful of people in the room. Something felt completely different about what was happening, different than anything I’d experienced before. God was in the room. His glory was there. There were long expanses of time when things were so quiet that all you could hear was people sobbing. I had scheduled a meeting for immediately after service with one of our volunteer leaders about something important, but when it was time for me to meet with her at about 8:35, I felt the spirit of God quicken me. Just that morning I had read the story of Mary & Martha, when Jesus came to their home for a visit. Martha was so busy making things perfect in her house for Jesus that she freaked out when she noticed her sister Mary just sitting there at Jesus’ feet, taking everything in and doing nothing. Why wasn’t Mary helping?! Tell her to help, Jesus! “And Jesus answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41).

Earlier that day in my quiet time, I heard the Lord whisper to me and say “Cassie, Cassie, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed…” When God whispers your name in the tenderest way, you do well to listen. And as I felt the pressure to attend my meeting, I heard the echoes of his words to me… “Cassie, Cassie…” So I stayed in the service, in His presence, mostly quiet with not much to say, leaning in, straining to hear what He would say.

About 45 minutes into this move of God, my pastor, Pastor Jeff, spoke. He said that God was in the room, and this was our moment to declare whatever it was that we wanted to see in our lives. If we declared it, God would declare it, and literally anything we asked in that moment would be done. My usual response to something like this would be to say, “God, you’ve already done so much for me, I’m not going to ask for anything!” But again, the Lord quickened me, and I felt compelled to ask for the thing that I had been crying out for for almost 2 years. There, on the stage, kneeling before the Lord, I declared emotional wholeness over my life, complete emotional healing, and freedom from depression.

After this incredible time of declaration, Pastor Jeff shared what he had seen in his spirit. He said that he saw two rainbows over the church, almost crossing one another. He said these would be a sign of the promise of God. My friend, Pastor Justin, spoke up and said, “Like a double rainbow!” We all chuckled in light of the trippy famous Double Rainbow youtube video. The evening concluded, we all went home, seriously touched by the presence of God. I didn’t give my declaration much thought after that.

The next day, I was working late on a project in my office, and I got a text from a friend:

Are you at the church? Look outside

I looked out of the front glass doors of my office building and I gasped. I saw this:

All I could do was laugh. Not even 24 hours later, over our church, from one side to another, we saw a double rainbow. A flurry of text messages ensued among those who were present during that special time in the previous night’s service. It was almost comical, that we could see with our own eyes the double rainbow that Pastor Jeff had seen in his vision the night before.

A few weeks later, after this occurrence, I woke up and realized something. The heaviness over my eyes was gone. It had been, for a few days, but I had just now noticed. I proceeded cautiously, afraid to say anything about it since I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, afraid that maybe I was just experiencing an up-swing in my mood instead of experiencing permanent freedom.

Yet here I am, almost 6 months later, writing this blog as a testament to the fact that God has completely delivered me from the oppression and depression that I experienced on and off for almost two years. The heaviness has lifted. I see hope. It fills my eyes like morning light, illuminating the future, the unknown, the path ahead of me. I’m not saying there aren’t moments that I feel sad or disappointed, but the shadow of depression has lifted and I’ve been completely healed. God has touched me in a powerful way as a result of what I declared that night at church, in a moment of holy boldness in His presence, and the double rainbow, hilariously enough, is my promise and my reminder of His faithfulness.

Hope is real. It exists. And it will find you if you cry out for it, because hope is a Person. Hope found me in a desperate place and He healed my heart in a way that no one and nothing else could. And even though this story is very personal and not something I’d usually shout from the rooftops, I wanted to share it because the Bible says we overcome by the blood of Jesus and by our testimony. This is one of the greatest things He’s ever done in me, and I’m so grateful!

If you struggle in the area of depression, or in any area, I want to tell you that there is power in declaring what God declares over you in His Word. When Jesus died on the cross, He took every pain that you and I would ever face upon himself and experienced the full weight of it. He did that for us. Not only did he suffer and die, taking on our sin, pain, and sorrows, but He rose and conquered all of it. HE IS VICTORY. I can’t give you a magical formula for experiencing what it is that you need from God. However, I do know that He loves you fiercely, passionately, voraciously. When you call, He answers, and He will show you great and mighty things (Jeremiah 33). Begin to declare in faith what God has promised, and see how He meets you.

I didn’t just wake up depressed one day. It descended upon me slowly, day by day, until one day the heaviness on me was inescapable. I don’t know how to describe the depression without using the word heaviness because that’s what it felt like. Every waking hour, there was a weight on my eyelids, on my forehead. It was a physically palpable feeling, the weight. Thinking it was maybe tiredness, I tried to sleep more, but I often would lay in bed the whole night without sleeping a solid hour. When I did sleep, it was so restless that I woke feeling drained and exhausted. Nothing could make the crying stop; the feeling of deep sadness that extended for days at a time; the hopelessness that wove itself so deeply into each facet of my thinking. I would look into my eyes in the mirror and see a deadness that was unlike me. The emptiness inside of me was scary. What was scarier was that no one seemed to notice. It felt like I was wearing the depression all over me like a garish outfit, yet no one said anything to me or asked me what was wrong, so that snowballed the thoughts that I was worthless and that my life didn’t matter to anyone.

I had never before been what I’d call “officially depressed.” Sure, I’d suffered bouts of sadness as a normal part of adolescence, and of course, the monthly dips in mood that come with the package of being a woman. My temperament is melancholy, but I’d never camped out in a place of permanent sadness. I’d seen “official depression” play out in my family life as a young person, and nothing I personally experienced came close to what I’d seen in others as I was growing up. Yet, through a domino-affect of circumstances, my internal pressure reached critical mass and all of the sudden, here I was. I had no answers. I felt so physically and spiritually depleted, I couldn’t muster up the words to form a coherent prayer. I felt so alone. And, yes, even as a Christian young woman, I felt lost. I couldn’t take it any more. I was ready to leave my entire life behind. I wanted out. [I'd like to interject here that in the middle of all of this struggle, I was on staff at a church, working in ministry, and leading worship on a weekly basis. I say this to point out to you that people who seem to have it together on the outside can be a complete, tangled mess on the inside with very few people being aware of it.]

I got into my car one day in the fall of 2009, not having any destination in mind, anything packed, or any plan, and I drove. I called in sick to work and just drove off. As I pulled out of my driveway, I knew that it might very well be the last time I saw my home. I drove and drove and drove, turning onto whatever highway I felt like, trying to drive toward some feeling of freedom from the oppression, trying to drive away from the darkness and toward any sliver of hope that might exist out there, at the end of the road. After awhile, I ended up in St. Augustine. Not knowing what else to do, I parked and walked on the beach for awhile. It was a very windy day and the sand stung my legs and arms and lashed my hair across my face like tiny whips. Should I keep driving? Where should I go? I tried to read the Bible that I brought with me, but there was nowhere to sit, so I got back in my car. And I drove home.

A few days later, I made the decision to seek professional counseling from a great Christian counselor, and after a few months, he helped me pinpoint some of the causes of the depression. We talked about things I had kept tucked away, and he helped me excavate them. As I worked with him to seek God for healing and wisdom, I felt a measure of change, but everything was still so iffy. I’d have great days, even great weeks, and then something would happen and swing me back down into deep sadness. And the lingering feeling of weight on my forehead persisted. It was a physical reminder every day that I was not normal. I wasn’t “me.”

I cried out to God for change. I wanted to feel the joy that is a result of the indwelling of God’s Spirit in His people. I craved it. Yet my emotional life was roller-coaster of inconsistency. I lived this way for two years. However, in 2011, I would experience a powerful moment in God’s presence that would change me forever.

To be continued…

I was looking for a book that I could pull apart to use for a craft project, and I found my two old journals. These journals are really precious to me because they document most of my 20′s, which was a time of constant change, upheaval, craziness, challenge… Reading back through them tonight, I see that the overarching theme, however, is the extreme faithfulness of God!

I read an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote after a breakup in 2008. I was listing all the qualities I wanted in a husband, after experiencing a relationship that didn’t quite measure up to God’s best for me. Among the laundry list of qualities, I wrote that I wanted:

Someone who understands that I’m complicated, but thinks that’s ok.

When I reread it, I laughed. A lot of that relationship was spent trying to pretend that I was uncomplicated, that I didn’t have fears, and worries, and underlying major questions about where the relationship was headed.

The truth is, I’m complicated. But so are you. So let’s all just be ok with it, ok?