I am too busy for my faith. It’s a controversial thing to say really, as I profess to be a committed and faithful Christian lady who loves God with her whole heart, and is grateful beyond words for Jesus and his saving death on the cross. However, I am too busy for my faith.

This does not mean it has gone anywhere, it means I am in a place where, quite frankly, I don’t have the energy to pray, read the bible, or talk to God. I am finding this current state of being exceptionally frustrating, mostly because the intensity of what I believe and the depth to which I believe it has not changed. I don’t doubt the existence of God, the fact that Jesus came to earth as man and died on the cross creating the opportunity for us to meet with God and have relationship with him. I believe it, I just don’t seem able to reach any sort of emotion about it.

It is a fantastical story, and Christmas has been a time of recognising just how huge the story is. However, despite the apparent absurdity of it I just can’t be bothered to give it the time it deserves. I can sit there and say that I miss it, but it doesn’t mean I do anything to change it. I am lazy.

The thing I doubt more than anything is myself. See the question is now in my head, how am I depressed? I know the story – it’s an illness, which means that it could happen to anyone. However, I have everything I want. I am happy and loved, and yet here I am, at the lowest I have felt in a very long time, with nothing seemingly able to shift it for over 2 months.

Am I just in dreamland? Creating some form illness in order to get away with being exceptionally lazy when it comes to coping?

I know the answer is no, but the longer this goes on with no improvement to my health despite my life getting better and better the more I feel like a fraud. This feeling has helped me to retreat. Church (this is any church, not a particular one) is where I feel the worst. I cannot sit still for the length of a service without getting anxious, so often I find a reason not to go. You feel slightly foolish if you are getting up and down 3 or 4 times in the length of time a toddler can sit still, and can’t help but feel people will be questioning your attentiveness, ability to listen and how committed you really are.

I have pulled back from a lot of my friends, not because I don’t want to see them, but because contact just seems like such an effort. How can you say ‘I can’t be bothered to call you’ without it offending? I am planning the wedding, and enjoying it mostly, and then going to work – and enjoying that. Then spending time with Mike and my family and that is all I can muster.

In the midst of all of this frustration, irritation, laziness and exhaustion I just don’t feel like going to God. What will he do? He will comfort me – he always does and I will come away feeling stronger, but no better. I am tired of being strong. I want to be weak or I want to be free and ‘better’ whatever that means.

I don’t really know what I want to say here. I don’t think I have a huge point to make. Other than the fact that in the midst of it all I know that there is hope to come. I don’t know what it will look like, or when it will come, but despite not talking to God, not spending time with him I know he is there. He is just sitting with me in silence.

I am looking forward to when I have the energy to find time for God, but in the meantime I will just get on with each day knowing he is with me and waiting patiently, with huge love as I plod on in frustrated depression. I do get the odd little glimmer of hope though. Whilst walking in the garden I came across this snow drop. I like flowers, they talk to me of a creative, imaginative and excited God, full of colour and delight. Seeing this just sitting amongst some very young grass in the middle of the winter, having survived the storms over Christmas spoke of hope to me. In the dark there is something that can bring the tiniest bit of light. Perhaps even enough to get you through a day.