How Friendship Makes Us All Stronger

God’s Strength Often Comes Through a Friend

By Kari Bale

The sink was filled with dishes: pots, pans, plates, bowls—all caked with dried, rotting food. The counter top on both sides had begun receiving the overflow, and the fetid tableware now reached all the way to the corner, where a particularly disgusting pile was constantly swarming with fruit flies. That area, I had decided, was lost. I had ceded it to the flies.

For weeks, I had been eating fast food and takeout meals simply to avoid having to use my kitchen in any way. Whenever I looked at the disaster zone that used to be my sink, I quickly looked away in shame, berating myself for failing to live up to even the most basic standards of adulthood. Frankly, I was willing to write off all of my cookware and dishes as beyond redemption, but I couldn’t even work up the motivation to throw them all into a garbage bag and take them to the dumpster behind my apartment building.

A Vicious Cycle

This may be impossible for some of you to understand, but this is life with a chronic major depressive disorder. Once a cycle of shame begins, it can be very hard to break. I got a little behind in doing my dishes and I had trouble finding the energy to catch up; soon, I was ashamed of myself for not being able to get the dishes done, because there must be something wrong with me to fail at something so simple. But the shame only leads to deeper depression and further exhaustion, which in turn leads to more and more dishes piling up in the sink, until an entire 16-piece dinnerware set has been lost to a swarm of fruit flies. “Pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up” (Eccl. 4:10).

The fact is, I was not going to be able to pull myself out of this hole—not on my own. I did not have the energy, I did not have the willpower, and frankly, I did not have the skills. I needed help.