For about five months last year, I struggled through a long, dark mental tunnel that seemed to have no end. I battled daily with mental darkness that I had never known before. As a lifelong Christian Scientist, I have appreciated the many healings I've had as a result of increased understanding of my relationship to a loving God—that of Father-Mother and beloved child. But little did I know that my understanding of this relationship would be put to such a difficult test. All help, even God's help, seemed beyond my grasp. In short, I was horribly and inexplicably depressed.
Tears of frustration, doubt, and heaviness pervaded my thinking for so long that I was even beginning to wonder if I was still God's child. My job as a legal secretary seemed like a deadend career—I had not found it satisfying for several years, but I couldn't find any way to change my circumstances. Although I was enjoying finishing up a three-year term as my branch church's treasurer, the added pressure of the workload, piled on top of my already busy schedule of working, commuting, and attending night school, was tipping the balance until I felt I was drowning in a bottomless sea of paperwork. Issues of inharmony seemed to be cropping up at church from time to time, and I was affected by them, regardless of whether or not I was directly involved. I also felt that all these activities, while important, decreased my time for spiritual study, and therefore, seemed to cause a lack of spiritual growth.
Finally, I had been dating a man whom I loved dearly. He was very supportive of me during this period, but on occasion he had a hard time understanding what I was going through, and why. We had discussed marriage, although we were both still unsure about the right direction for our relationship. We felt that prayer had brought us together in the first place, but with my morose outlook about life in general, I wondered if I should just end the relationship. To top it all off, he had just trundled off to a foreign language course in—of all places—Siberia.
