The events of our lives can only be there to mark us. To make us stronger. To seemingly defeat us and then, somehow, turn into something like victory. To give us just enough hope to keep us fighting. Sometimes our fighting is just a scratching at a bare wall while we lay face-down on the ground, but at least we've lifted our hands from our sides and we are trying. We may crawl, but at least we're moving.
Depression feels like that. I drift in and out of it. Mostly out, but sometimes it seems to completely drown me. Thank God for David. No one in the Bible writes more eloquently and honestly as he. The Psalms have been my favorite passages of the Bible since I could read.
Others write well, too. I have been reading excerpts from poems, books, snippets of life written on the back of grocery lists... One such is a paragraph sent to me by a dear friend from a book by C.S. Lewis called "That Hideous Strength" - that's a book with some serious punch. Well worth the read. This paragraph sort of describes the complexity of walking with Christ; of seeing the old turn to the new. Of not really grasping what has changed, and whether the change is even good yet, but knowing things are different. Reminds me of another C.S. Lewis book where, in describing Aslan, Mr. Tumnus says, "Aye. He's not safe. But He's good."

"The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Somthing expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between... This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them; but from them you could know nothing of it. There was nothing, and never had been anything like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called 'me' dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air...
The largest thing that had ever happened to her had, apparently, found room for itself in a moment of time too short to be called time at all."
 -- C.S. Lewis "That Hideous Strength"

Regarding my journey to wellness... I have two more rounds of heavy duty chemo, and will be finished with that in January. I'll take a short break and begin 6 weeks of radiation - a short burst of it daily, 5 days a week. After that they tell me I need time to recover before reconstructive surgery. We still have months to go, but every moment God is working. And He is always good.