Our Enemy Despair

I was always irritated by one particular exchange in the film Anne of Green Gables. After hungering desperately for a home, Anne finds out the one she has been promised doesn't want her after all. She says she is "in the depths of despair." Wanting Mirilla to understand, she asks, "Can't you at least imagine you are in the depths of despair?" "No," Mirilla replies, "I cannot. To despair is to turn your back on God." The woman's reply always seemed a little heartless to me.

But in my own life, I begin to see a grain of truth in her words.

Despair is a nightmarish figure. In Pilgrim's Progress he shows up as a terrible giant. In The Faerie Queen, he is an old man living among "a ghastly windfall" of corpses--bodies fallen from trees upon which they had hung themselves after heeding his arguments. Despair lies and speaks from both sides of his mouth. He manipulates guilt and coaxes forth hopelessness. He is, indeed, a formidable enemy, not least because he often presents himself inside his intended victim's mind, speaking with the sound of his victim's voice.

"Things are so bad," he says, "they can never be set right. What mends today will only break again tomorrow. Why bother with life? It is a dreary business which you will certainly botch."

But to listen to him is to not listen to God. While physiological imbalances often play a key role in wrong thinking, a willful choice to despair is a faithless choice. For to despair--to absolutely despair--is to act as though God's goodness does not exist and Despair's black lies are the ultimate reality. "Curse God and die," said Job's wife. But he didn't. And we hear his impossible assertion: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me" (Job 19:25-27 NIV).

There is often a kind of fierceness when we choose to defy our enemy Despair. It is like standing blindly in an empty room and screaming. He makes us think that he is only our own voice speaking, not an enemy trying to devour our bodies if not our souls. Yet we speak into that empty room, saying in the face of what feels like flawless logic: "No. God does have a good point for my life--one that isn't simply to use me as a warning for others. I am His child and His poem. He has planned good works for me to do. Not only that, He has born my griefs, carried my diseases,and wants me to cast my cares upon Him, too! Is anything in this shattered world so ruined that He cannot fix it, He who has been broken Himself?"

So off with you--you pit, you giant, you gaunt old man! I have better company tonight. "How precious to [or concerning] me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you" (Psalm 139:17-18 NIV).