I’m going to be very vulnerable with you guys so bear with me.
It hit a personal low this past month. It all started a few days after we arrived in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. My team and I were doing Unsung Heroes, which is where we go around the country or city we’re in and try and find future contacts for AIM. The first few days were great then on the 4th day in Vietnam I woke up with my hands swollen and my skin covered in hives.
I have a lot of allergies to many different things but since being on the Race I hadn’t had any allergic reaction to anything until now.
When I woke up with the hives I immediately started panicking and woke one of my teammates up who is a nurse for help. My team leader and I went to the hospital but the doctor wasn’t able to do anything except give me steroids, but he didn’t want to do that because steroids are hard on the body. The doctor told me to come back if they’ve got worse, so we went home to our hostel. The next day I woke up and the hives had gotten worse, my lips were swollen along with my eyes. My TL and I went back to the doctor and this time he gave me the steroids to help with the hives.
If you’ve ever had hives you know exactly how I felt, they are excruciatingly itchy and they can cause swelling that is painful.
I’ve struggled with depression since I was about 13 years old. When I was 16 it got really bad and I contemplated suicide and came close one time to committing it. That was the one time I actually heard God’s voice, He told me to stop and that He needed me on earth because He has a plan for me and it doesn’t involve me taking my own life.
The last time I had a depressive low was when I was 18 and had really bad hives from medication that I was allergic too. I wanted to die then, I would sit in our basement freaking out trying not to scratch and asking God to just kill me. You probably think I was being dramatic but it’s how I felt, I was only focused on myself and what was going on in that moment and I couldn’t see past it.
The thing about my depression is that I never let anyone know, I wanted to suffer by myself. I wanted to sit in my pain.
So back to my most recent low point. After I got the steroids from the doctor I would just stay in our hostel while my team would go out to do ministry. I would just sit there by myself and those old familiar thoughts would start to creep in.
“No one cares about you”
“No one would care if you were dead”
“Look at you, you’re totally useless”
“Your worthlessness”
I went to old habits and would just sit in those lies. I didn’t tell my team what was going on cause I didn’t think they would care, I just wanted to suffer by myself. But God wouldn’t let me. After a few days my team came to me with feedback, they told me that I had to let them in and that they needed to know what was going on. So through tears I poured everything out that I had bottled up inside me. Once I was done my team said that they were there for me, that they love me and then they surrounded me and prayed for me. I only felt love from my team and I saw how much they cared for me by calling me out of the depressive hole I was wallowing in. Being in close community for 24/7 can have a lot of hard moments but those never outweigh the good ones.
I still have the hives but God’s healing me of that and He’s healing me of my depression to. I have seen so much of God’s goodness this year and He has shown me the endless amount of love he has for me. He is shaping me and making me new. He is so good!
