By Jill Haugen 
I was picking up momentum toward my lifelong dream of becoming a writer: my articles were being published, my poetry was winning awards, the final draft of a novel was being polished, and then . . . and then, well, from the outside, nothing.
But on the inside, my heart and mind had somehow stumbled into a deep, black well. I fought breathlessly to climb out of it. When I couldn’t, I found myself clenched with anxiety, lying awake night after night until 4 a.m., my entire body trembling. The counselors my husband dragged me to dubbed it anxiety-induced depression. My unrealized dreams were the least of my concerns. I just didn’t care about them anymore.
I’m thankful I didn’t know then that this would drag on for the next seven years. At the end of that, an unaware friend unwittingly taught me how to rewire my brain. It’s been five years, and I’ve had no falling-back-to-the-bottom-of-the-well relapse. While grateful and relieved to be out of that darkness, I found myself going through a new process of grief, one I didn’t know was a thing: mourning the time I had lost.
There were days and weeks and months of sorrow and searching, anger and questioning. Why did God allow me to go through that? Why didn’t He heal me sooner? Why did He allow me to miss out on so much of my kids’ childhoods and, more importantly, why did He allow my kids to have less-than-at-my-best kind of mom for so long? And then, less importantly but still festering: Why did He call me to write if He knew I was going to throw it away?
While I did eventually start writing again, I couldn’t help ruminating on all I could have written in those seven years if I hadn’t gone AWOL. One day as I was on my daily prayer walk, grouching about it yet again, I practically heard the words: What about your journals?
I went home and dumped out my box of journals. Yes, box. There were piles of notebooks, every page a prayer crying out for relief, sometimes a copied Psalm that spoke the language of my grief for me. As I read through what I had written in my fog, it dawned on me that I hadn’t in fact stopped writing all those years; I was just writing to a different audience, an audience of One.
I look back at what I had published previously and see myself in every piece: my pride, my ego, me, me, me. While I still don’t have the answers to a lot of my questions, I have seen that the time I spent at the bottom of that well has, among other things, given me a message worth writing about.
At first, I felt almost arrogant thinking that. I mean, what do I think I am, some kind of prophet? But then, who were the prophets? Normal people. Sometimes unstable people. Sometimes downright losers. When I think of it that way, I know I can totally be the next normal, everyday loser He uses.
I realize that what you’re grieving is probably not a hoped-for writing life—maybe it’s marathons or marriage or travel to Finland or inventing the Roomba that conquers stairs (someone! please!) or rising to CFO or adoption or your dream Etsy company or a kitchen renovation or, or, or . . . but here you are instead. Staring at the ashes.
Take it from this normal, everyday, loser prophet: Let Him put your mind at ease about the time that seems to be slipping away, whether it’s seven years or days or decades. I mean, considering He is the creator of time, considering He is the One who said a thousand years is a day to Him, He certainly has no difficulty restoring to you any amount of time lost to such things as bottom-of-the-well-dwelling.
Until He leads you out of that well, know that even there, you are not alone. And when the time comes that you find yourself back in the open, just wait and see: see how He will restore what you thought was lost, see how He will make all things new for you, see how He will turn those ashes into beauty.
by Cindy Houlden 
by Her View From Home 
by Holly Lemons 
