So often mood disorders complicate our spirituality. How to know which came first. Is it even important to know which came first?

It’s important then to keep God in the equation. Don’t look to the future without remembering that God is in your future just as he is with you in the present. Don’t look to the future and see only the bad even if the bad is real without remembering that you need to keep God in your calculations.

When we’re feeling low spiritually, of course, our mood seems to follow. And certainly when we are feeling low emotionally, we often feel distanced from God as well.

“Let not your heart be troubled, trust in me” is the command we have to remember when we look to the future, especially is our depression has convinced us we will never be better.

I have one specific fear that gets me down every time if I linger too long on it. It’s like I almost want to get there so I can get past it. Know what I mean? We talked about meta emotions earlier and that’s how it plays out. We know what anxiety feels like, for example, and when we think of the future and that if so and so happens, we will feel anxious again, we almost want to get there quickly so we can get beyond it.

We are never promised grace until we need it. We can’t hoard it up either for a rainy day. We can’t borrow some from our future allotment. We just have to remember that it is being held just for us. It’s kind of like a prescription. 

We get a prescription when we need it. The prescription will be uniquely ours, just for our particular ailment. We won’t get someone else’s prescription of grace, only our own.

Oswald Chambers says in, “My Utmost For His Highest”, “All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God”. That doesn’t mean we pretend there is no “bad” in our future but that God is greater than whatever “bad” comes our way. 

We forget that God is with us now. We need to deal with it now. If our fear comes true in the future God will also be there, right there, in that moment. The “there” will become the now once again and once again God will help us in the “now”.

We all know we shouldn’t borrow trouble. It’s especially hard when depression is messing with our minds to really practice it. But we still need to try.

Remember, don’t calculate the future without God.