Day 14: I am Thankful for the Ugly

Ugly: The loss of interest in EVERYTHING.  The days I lost the ability to care about diddly squat.

Ugly: Days when my internal dialogue was only, "You'll never be good enough.  You can't even do the basics.  You suck.  You're a bad mother.  You're a bad wife.  Etc."

Ugly: The days when I was afraid to speak to my children, and tried to avoid speaking, because my thoughts and attitude where so polluted that only trash was likely to come out. 

Depression is ugly.  It leads me to apathy and chronic exhaustion.  It robs me of my family when I have to disconnect to avoid hurting them.  It is a messy, messy configuration.

And it's geometrical shape is a spiral.  Downwards.

Once the sadness, bitterness and slow anger initiated, it would continue to build.  Or maybe a better description would be to say depression would continue to tear down. It would use a hammer and a chisel until the structure weakened and the wrecking ball came.

It was like being in a pot of water.  Fire under the pan that would increase in increments until I realized I was boiling.

There's an illustration in the Bible that sounds just like what I went through.  When metal, say silver or gold, is pulled out of the mountain, it is a thin vein of pretty surrounded by plain ol' rock.  The oldest way to refine metal is to heat it up, to melt it.  The more precious metals would sink to the bottom.  The unimportant materials like the rock, called "dross," would float to the top. The refiner would then scrape or blow the dross off.  Then they would let the metal cool and repeat the process.  Each time the precious metal would be cleaned out a little more, becoming a little more pure.

"Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction."  Isaiah 48:10 (ESV)

"Furnace of Affliction."  Sounds a lot like my depression cycle.  When the heat comes on me, the nasty comes out.  He wants to remove the ugly from my heart.  Sometimes my ugly is close to the surface, and only requires a quick burst of fire.  Some of my ugly was buried deep.  It required a slow simmer of 20 years until I reached the boiling point and the nasty came to the very top. 

And then the dross was gone.  I felt better.  I felt like a clean person.  To be noted: I no longer felt like that horrible dirty person I had been thinking I was.  I didn't suck anymore.  I wasn't a bad mother anymore.  Life changed.

In the last two days my computer got a virus and my ceiling has started dripping water mere hours before a snow storm is supposed to hit.  Blasted monkeys with their blasted wrenches prodded me to once again take out my frustrations on my children.  But I felt the Holy Spirit say, "No."  I stepped back.  I didn't yell at them...that time. 

I'm thankful to see the ugly because that means it can be removed. 

I'm not done, but I'm done for now.