CRAMMED WITH HEAVEN: Made for joy

A new monthly column in which Jenni Pretorius Hill shares stories of hope which bring Heaven’s perspective to Earth

Jesus was a happy man. But the Bible also tells us he was well acquainted with grief and sorrow. In my journey in ministry, I have often found that people are more comfortable with a mournful Jesus. When people weep in meetings it is acknowledged as a legitimate indication of the presence of Jesus. But laughter and demonstrations of joy can be viewed with suspicion and judgment as if being happy is offensive to Heaven. 

It is true that like Jesus, we too at some point in our lives will be acquainted with grief and sorrow, if we have not experienced it already; it is inevitable, an unquestionable reality of life on earth. But as we acknowledge this, why can we not equally entertain the notion that joy – rampant, tangible and contagious – is as much our portion as it was Jesus’s? 

I was diagnosed with clinical depression when I was 27 years old. It was at a time in my life where I should have been at my happiest – newly married to a man I had loved for years and experiencing the freedom of unfettered youth. Perhaps depression had lain quiet inside me for a while and only triggered with a bout of inexplicable and serious illness. The condition, as it was explained to me, had recently been recognised and studied by the medical community and just as no doctor could tell me what had initiated it, neither could they tell me when or whether it would end.

 After a year of intense physical struggle and multiple hospital visitations, I began entertaining the possibility that this was a life-sentence and my imagination took me to places in my future that saw me forever trapped in discomfort and pain, with no escape. It was a slow and steady decline into the abyss of depression. Eventually my hope – unable to withstand the pressure inflicted on it by my mind’s unrelenting visions of endless suffering – buckled completely, giving way to an emotional and spiritual breakdown. I was a complete mess. Unable to follow a coherent train of thought or engage in any kind of meaningful conversation or activity, I would sleep continuously and in my waking hours, carry out the basic tasks of survival like an automaton. There are large gaps in my memory of those days and recalling them is as difficult as staring into a blackened room and trying to identify its contents by their vague outlines. But there are some things that I do remember because they were charged with emotion. 

I recall a drive home alone from Durban to the South Coast after an appointment with a psychiatrist. I switched on the car radio only to catch the tail-end of a talk by someone from a South African depression support group before he opened the line to calls. A man phoned in, and his voice was calm and rational. He described his condition of depression as an illness that he would never just shake off. “It’s not the blues, or something I’ll just get over one day,’ he said. ‘Depression has everything to do with brain chemistry and it needs medication and the sooner one can accept that, the easier it is to live with it.” 

As he spoke it, it was as if he was giving me an invitation to slip on a custom-made jacket and button it up to my neck; a jacket made just for me by all the voices in my head and shaped by my circumstances and fashioned by my pain. I wouldn’t have to fight it anymore; the jacket would tell my story so that I would never have to explain myself or make excuses for why I was feeling the way I was. But I knew that if I put it on, it would be very hard to take off. My response was to shout ‘no!’ to the faceless person on the radio. No! to accepting it. No! to living with it and no! to medication for the rest of my life. I couldn’t deny that everything he had said was truthful and my own experience bore testimony to the facts, but it was not something I could reconcile with the truth of Scripture and the promise of Jesus. I decided that although depression had a grip on me, joy was my actual portion, and I would not settle for less.

It wasn’t easy. I could not switch off my physical symptoms, which were with me day and night, and I was so tired that being awake for longer than five hours at a stretch was torment; but I could start to govern my thoughts. Every day I was faced with a choice. What was I going to believe? Initially, it was simply a choice of whether I believed in God. There were times I wanted to abandon my faith, in the same way I felt God had abandoned me; but I could not. When I had acknowledged my undiminished belief in God, my husband asked me: ”Is He the God of the Bible in whom you believe?’ I had to consider that question deeply because it had ramifications, but again, I could not deny that I believed in the God of the Bible. And because my confession was “yes”, my husband challenged me: “Then you need to believe in what He has said in the Bible.”

 I couldn’t afford to have my circumstances and experiences shape my theology. It had to be the other way round. I knew the Word, at least I thought I did. I had done Bible school and I quoted Scripture, but I had never needed to believe the Word of God like it was a matter of life and death. But that is what it became for me. I had to believe that I would see His goodness in the land of the living, that healing, and hope existed this side of Heaven, otherwise I saw no point in going on. 

Slowly, my body began to heal. I started to go several days where I didn’t experience any symptoms of the illness. I had eaten very little for a long time because I could not tolerate the experience or taste of food, but gradually I started to regain my appetite and add weight to my diminished frame. But although I started feeling better and an end to the physical affliction became an increasing probability, it was as if the hope of experiencing any kind of joy was gone from me forever. 

One afternoon I was on my bed with the curtains drawn and the room in darkness. It had not been a good day. Perhaps it had not been a good several days – I cannot remember. My husband had gone for a walk on the beach, and I thought I was alone in the room when I became aware of someone standing in the brightened doorway. I did not see Him, but I felt Him as clearly as anyone is aware of the presence of another in one’s immediate space. Jesus is many things, but that afternoon He came to me as Strength. A tangible feeling came over me that filled my being with the sure knowledge that I was able to heal, and in fact, it was no longer a future hope but a present reality. 

I got up quickly. Gone was the crippling lethargy and tiredness; I was completely recharged. My husband came home a little later, but he didn’t need to see me to know that everything had changed. We compared stories. Jesus had met with both of us, at the same time, that afternoon. He described the encounter on the beach, the tangible voice telling him: “It is finished,” just as I, back home, had got up from the bed. 

I came off medication a little while later and I have never been back on any kind of mental health drugs. That was nearly 20 years ago now. There have been times where I have taken a few steps on that dark path again, and I can feel the lure into fear and negativity, but I have decided that there is too much of heaven crammed into this relatively small space that is my beating heart, to allow for the darkness to have a voice. I like to think that as I grow older, I’m looking a lot more like Jesus. Is that not our destiny? To be transformed into His very likeness? To become joy. 

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