The Branch and the Vine: How Jesus Gave Me Freedom from Depression

By Stephen D. Edwards

 Rates of depression rose to unprecedented levels during the COVID-19 crisis as many people became isolated in order to avoid infection from one of the worst virus epidemics in human history. With all the prevalent despair and uncertainty it is so understandable that society should have expected the mental health of the world's populations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen D. Edwards
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781999151461

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The Branch and the Vine:

How Jesus Gave Me Freedom From Depression

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Edwards, Stephen Douglas, 1964–

The Branch and the Vine / Stephen D. Edwards

Copyright © 2019, 2023 Stephen D. Edwards

Second edition

Hard cover ISBN: 978-1-9991514-9-2

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-9991514-3-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-9991514-6-1

All scripture quotations in this book are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Cover photograph by David Monje

(Instagram: @david.monje)

To Wangu and Isaac

In loving memory of Glen and Roberta

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I – Detached from the Vine

One - I Am Not Who I Was

Two - A Path to Destruction

Three - Power in Optimism

Four - Anger in Speech

Six - Anxiety the Destroyer

Seven - Stuck in Addiction

Part II – Grafted into the Vine

Eight - Healthy Boundaries

Nine - Make Amends and Forgive

Ten - Reconciling Friendships

Eleven - Gratitude

Twelve - Rejoice in the Lord

Thirteen - Hope and Faith

Fourteen - The Blessing in the Struggle

Fifteen - Trust God

Appendix – The 12 Steps of Recovery

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Introduction

Isee that you’ve picked me up. Stop looking at the world around you and look back onto the page. No one is reading your mind. You are holding me open to read and find out what is inside, because either you suffer from depression or you know someone who does. Each time I hear or read about the death of someone famous by suicide, I’m moved to tears. Perhaps that is because it could have been me. But it seems that there is something else going on.

Let me tell you a little of my story. I suffered from depression for about 35 years, slogging through it without the benefit of drugs or psychotherapy. After gaining freedom from the dark hole, I felt that I had to share my story. The tears confirm God’s call on me to write this book and others. Will you find freedom from depression? I don’t know, nor can I guarantee it. Now even if you are not a believer in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, the ideas I express in this book are worth the read for the chance you might have to gain freedom from depression. I know only one other thing about you, and this might be most important: you desire freedom and healing from depression. You are done with it. I can only describe living with depression as a mystery. Most anti-depressants lead us deeper into depression. I have not ever taken any medication nor had any prescribed. Many other treatments also don’t work.

I know only one thing about depression. It is the most difficult thing I have ever had to bear, and my friends and family past and present have also had to bear it vicariously, even if they didn’t know I suffered. Depression also defies description, as my description will be different from how the next person might describe it, and once I start describing it, I might have to confess membership in an on-and-on anon group, because I won’t be able to stop. It is a deep, dark, inescapable pit where up and down cannot be discerned. It is a quagmire world of derision from endless sources. It is a waterfall of a variety of poisons contaminating the most precious and sacred landscapes, causing outcries of horror. It is a darkness so dark that darkness would call it darker than itself. In truth, it is where the enemy wants us all to reside for eternity, and forever brainwashed to believe the perception that no solution exists. A deceptively lit tunnel that turns dark once we enter to any depth, we cannot exit the way we entered. Okay! I have to stop! It’s taking up too much space! Of all the possible struggles and conditions I have ever experienced or read about, depression is both the most challenging and the most demanding thing to live with in my opinion. The reason I say this is that if I get a cold, I know it will go away soon enough and it won’t kill me; if a knife or a stone injures me, I know the wound will heal soon. Even if I become critically ill, I know that I will heal or I will die. If I die, I have a green pasture to look forward to in eternity. None of those things is worse than being stuck in a slimy prison where the slime causes the locks to change so that the keys no longer fit (I know! I tried to describe depression again!).

Having become free and healed from the condition that we call depression, I soon after heard God’s call to share my story, but I didn’t know how or why. I knew that many others had written down stories of overcoming depression. I asked God what makes my story so different from the others. I’ve shared my testimony before and wasn’t that enough? No. People need to hear how it happened. People need more than hope through a tale of healing that they believe cannot happen to them. People need a revelation that we must not reduce depression to a mere disease to remedy with drugs or electro-shock treatment, and we definitely can no longer tolerate living with depression, and others are tired of seeing their friends and family lose their lives to the ravages of suicide and spiritual death.

As I say, there is no guarantee this will work for anyone, because there are so many factors. Whether you are at the point of complete desperation or concerned about friends’ or relatives’ mental health, I offer hope through my story and this book. That’s enough. I’ve taken up enough of your time. Let’s get started!

Part I – Detached from the Vine

One - I Am Not Who I Was

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

–C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves ¹

My battle with depression was rough, and I talk about it in the past tense because God’s plan is to keep it away. But to get to this point was a process, and I didn’t go through it alone. I leaned on God, and I have a mentor and accountability partners who helped and continue to help me. Before I get much further, I’ll just say that all is in the past and forgiven. Amends have been made and relationships reconciled. Most important to me, that includes my family.

I am the eldest of three siblings, born and raised in Latin America of British parents who loved us and did their best as parents. We moved every two to four years.

At age 10, I joined the Boy Scouts and began to learn and gain recognition for skills and knowledge. The merit badges I earned gave me recognition that fulfilled a need for approval. But they also sparked a dream to achieve greatness in the top rank of Eagle Scout. With that goal in mind, my leaders advised me to seek the mentorship of a local priest. Little did I know that my Boy Scout days would soon end, and I had to give up that pursuit.

But I had another dream—a bigger dream. I’d flown on airplanes a few times and even been invited into a cockpit in flight. I dearly desired to become a pilot. It wasn’t because it’s a high-paying job or holds any prestige; it was just cool!

At home, there was frequent bickering and quarreling between my siblings and me. The fighting led my parents to decide to send me to a military boarding school when I was 11. They included me in the decision, so I can’t put everything on them for this. The thought of flying lessons offered by the school—and graduates would have opportunities in the US Air Force or as civilian aircraft pilots—convinced me to go. I might learn to fly? I might be an airline pilot? Yet somehow, those flying lessons didn’t get started, even though my peers talked about their experiences in the flight program. Attending this school killed both of my dreams—to become an Eagle Scout and to be a pilot!

The teachers were strict and rarely encouraged students. Many of the other students attending were cool and good friends, but they were not family. The school also failed to teach me the wisdom of discipline, which was my parents’ intent in sending me there. Instead, I saw many boys rebel against authority in ways I had never heard of. I saw many boys bully and try to make themselves lords over others, demanding praise like gods, while I needed a fatherly role model to follow, not even God.

That experience was horrible, and for many of us it might be enough to send us spiraling into depression. But I know that it was only a factor. Deep within me, I landed in the deep, dark hole of depression because of what happened back in grade one five years earlier. The teacher had each student stand up individually to count to 100 once per day until achieved. When I did trip on a number, the teacher would stop me and tell me to sit down and try again the next day. My classmates jeered and mocked me, but as unbearable as that was, the teacher’s lack of grace was worse. I have noticed that, even these days, I have a tendency to trip over my words while trying to perform the same feat.

I can’t really remember what the teacher looked like, but the tone of her voice telling me to sit down became terrifying. I remember feeling so traumatized that I sometimes forgot to go back to class after lunch or recess. It was a serious hit to my self-esteem and confidence. I didn’t tell my parents about this issue, but soon after that, fights with my brother became quite frequent.

Fast forward to the boarding school of bullies and derision. After three semesters, my parents allowed me to come home. But the family reunion would only last a year as my parents separated and later divorced. My parents decided that my brother and sister would move to Canada with my mother, while I stayed in Brazil with my father. Although I had a part in that decision, living with my father was a bad decision for me. I know that he loved me, but he didn’t father me and worshipped the gods of golf and other weekend pleasures. Even while at home the rest of the week, he was very distant. And in my earthly father’s abandonment, there was no one else I could trust enough to unload my burdens.

I began to break from the Vine and became lost.I sought the attention and approval of my peers, through partying and alcohol. It was during this time that I began to believe some lies about myself:

I’m not good at anything.

I have no talent.

I’m not smart.

I’m not manly nor courageous.

I have no future.

Nobody can forgive what I’ve done.

I’ll never change.

I need to fix these problems on my own.

I was barely hanging onto the Vine because of these lies and because in those days, we did not attend church for even a single Sunday. In my senior year of high school, I willfully turned away from God, telling my father that He could not possibly exist. His dismay surprises me even now, because we did not attend a church except maybe once or twice through those high school years. I can clearly remember thinking that Jesus must have just been a magician performing tricks instead of miracles. Clearly, I was undereducated on the subject of Christ. I snapped off the Vine completely.

Academically, I was doing fairly well, but I had no plans beyond high school. It was as if I thought the plans would all take care of themselves, as if I was a passenger on my own journey. And I was completely unprepared for life as an adult. I chose a post-secondary school before choosing a major because I had no passion or calling to do anything. It was all kind of arbitrary and lacking direction and vision. Having no perseverance, I gave up on earning a degree after two years of university.

By that time, I was deep into an addiction that sent me headlong into self-isolation, and I couldn’t escape the chains of shame and self-condemnation. The frustration that manifested in the sibling rivalry of childhood continued in verbal abuse, attempts to control others and fits of rage. The chains that imprisoned me became a new normal—my comfort zone.

Looking back on that reality from where I am now, I realize I had many short and broken friendships. Dating life seemed normal but it never reached any level of beauty by any standard. The chains on my soul hampered even my first marriage, which failed within 18 months. The reality was that I was in denial of my addiction. The shame of that addiction would come to light much later.

After that difficult time, I had a short relationship with a woman whom I can only say had a short temper and was easily offended. It ended with my arrest on an assault charge. That would later be resolved with a peace bond. Looking back, these two relationships had a dreadful effect on my ability to trust the women I would invite into my life. After that, I had a long string of short relationships that were a result of my odd dating expectations and attitudes including the trust issue.

Then for about three years, God used a girlfriend who said she was Christian to invite me to church. The Holy Spirit started to graft me back into the Vine, but the enemy still had his grip on me, keeping me in the darkness of depression, trying to hack my branch back off. I later declared Jesus as my Lord and Savior and I became a new creation.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

–2 Corinthians 5:17

I do not deserve His salvation and I could not earn it. It comes by faith.

⁸ For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, ⁹ not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

–Ephesians 2:8-9

That I regained my faith in God might seem to be the end of my maladies. However, that was not the case.

During my recovery from addiction, I left the relationship with the girlfriend who took me to church. Soon after that, I began dating Wangu, a Christian woman who would become my wife. All was good in that relationship until we were married and began setting up our household together. We discovered that we each had a separate vision how we were united in Christ.

My addiction hadn’t ceased and neither had my perfectionism, because I was still holding onto my old life in addiction and depression, which is why they persisted. Yet, in hindsight, healing was on my path for the first time in a long time. Jesus is the Living Water and the Vine watering the seed of my life.

Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

–John 4:10

It was perfectionism that led me to want my life to be according to my own plans, whereas my wife was following God’s plan as He led her. My prideful heart was tearing our marriage apart almost before it could take off. She has told me a few times since then that she was ready to leave me, but for the grace of God she didn’t do that. Perfectionism also tried to hold me deep in the darkness of depression.

The most important thing I heard after that time which also led me to the freedom from depression was that as a unique person in the world—as is everyone on Earth—I am loved just the way I am and so are you. You may not believe this, but you are beautiful.

As it turns out, I needed to remember that as I am loved by God, I need to love my neighbor. And how much more would I need to love my wife as she is no mere neighbor. When I applied this to my life, I was able to humble