By Rev. Nicholas Quient
When You Realize You Aren’t Okay: Pastoral Reflections on Depression
I remember exactly where I was. It was quite cold out, and the wind was crisp and icy. Leaves rustled on the concrete sidewalk as I meandered around barefoot, lost in thought. I have described this feeling as “the fog.” It rolls in from the ocean, over the houses and the road and hills, enveloping everything to the point where it becomes difficult to see anything.
Depression, in some minute sense, is like that.
I knew something was wrong with me. I knew I wasn’t where I needed to be emotionally. But, perhaps, that was normal—I had always felt that way. I had always felt understood. I had always felt like I had little to contribute. When I rounded the corner and kept walking, I felt a cold clarion call, a vibrancy that shook me a little bit—”I am depressed.”
“I am depressed.”
“I am a pastor and I’m depressed.”
The popular image of a pastor is of a person in a suit, standing behind a pulpit on a Sunday morning, preaching with enthusiasm and pomp, declaring the Word of the Lord. Images of assurance, confidence, even perfection often reign in the collective ecclesial imagination. I know I have been in churches where the image of the pastor is that he or she is simply beyond sinful comprehension, although that façade of the perfect pastor is quickly fading—for good and for ill.
And because of this collective imagination—and perhaps because of my own expectations of what I am capable of—I immediately felt even more unworthy of being a pastor. I felt very small. Numerous ideas and rationalizations and nuances rushed into my head, and for the next hour, I simply walked around that concrete sidewalk, thinking about everything. I wondered if my job was in jeopardy. I wondered if I had misread my own calling. I wondered about everything until an hour later and then I realized that my feet were numb. But, during that time, I felt utterly at a loss. And that was crucial for my theological and personal development—I needed to come to an understanding of what I was going through.
I didn’t know it was depression, nor did I realize how little I knew about mental illness.
But I knew one thing: that it was okay.
It was okay. The love of God is not contingent upon one’s mental capacity, and part of the process of healing was to remember that. In December 2019, when this all happened, I reached out to a psychologist and we’ve spent some time talking about all of this and I will continue seeing him. The fog is dense and dark, but the first step for me was the impulse toward healing.
For pastors who are going through this, or who don’t know that they aren’t okay: the icy night is not the whole story. The fog is not the final word. Take refuge in the incarnational love of Jesus Christ, whom even “the darkness could not overpower” (John 1:5).
Nicholas Rudolph Quient is associate pastor at The First Baptist Church of Redlands, California and the author of monograph The Perfection of Our Faithful Wills (Wipf & Stock, 2019).
Become a member, and get a big discount on retreats!
