Customer Reviews

When Spring Comes Late: Finding Your Way Through Depression

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have given out When Spring Comes Late to 6 people this week. Before I read it, I too held firm to the belief that depression is purely a spiritual issue and that with constant prayer, Bible reading, worship and counseling, people should stop being so self-centered, get their eyes on Jesus, and move forward. The Lord totally convicted me! I stopped and asked for forgiveness for this hardline view. Many of the older, wiser women in our women's leadership still hold this view. . . . You book has been a "God thing" in my life. It changed my heart to be more tolerant and patient with depressed women.

I am a Christian. I was depressed. This book changed my life and my perspective. This book is a must-read for anyone who is or has been Christian, depressed, single, married, male, female, chronically ill, divorced... just trust me on this one. I'm not going to tell you what it says because the author says it way better than I ever could. But give it a chance. I promise it's worth it.

I am a Christian who went through a severe bout of clinical depression five years ago. The Christian community is in desperate need of those who are willing to share their stories and help remove the stigma of this illness. It is time to lift the cover and allow Christians to seek treatment without shame and embarrassment.

Pam Rosewell Moore does an excellent job of handling the subject in a very sensitive and Biblical manner. Yes, it is possible that depression is the result of sin in your life and that avenue must be explored as the Holy Spirit will work to convict us of sin and call us to repentance. However, clinical depression is an illness, not caused by a lack of faith or sin, that requires medical intervention and treatment.

Moore also very sensitively addresses the issues of medication and counseling -- two areas that Christians seem to have a problem accepting. How I wish this book had been available to me as I suffered, and I can unequivocally recommend it. It is a great resource to the depressed and to the families and friends of the depressed.

I picked this book up at our local Christian bookstore with the intent to send it to someone I felt was very depressed. But first, I thought, maybe I should skim through it and make sure it isn't some crazy book that might make her feel even worse. So I started reading it. And after about 30 pages I was feeling really grouchy. It put me in a terrible mood. I couldn't figure out what was going on with me. And then I started to ask God if maybe this was something I needed to face in my life, rather than helping someone else face. And it was.
You see, my older brother died two and a half years ago, and I didn't realize that I had moved from grieving him to being incredibly depressed about my life and future. I had resigned myself to never really being joyful again, figuring that it was simply because my brother wouldn't be there in any moments that might otherwise bring joy. I'd conveniently forgotten that at several times in the past I struggled with what I now realize was depression, including cutting myself in highschool and in my early twenties. In my mind I had decided that life was happy before Karl died, and now it was going to be unhappy. I know that everyone grieves differently and I'm not saying that if you're still grieving after several years you're depressed. It's just what was going on with me.
I am so thankful that I started to read this so that I became aware of what was really going on in my heart. It has been a gentle and insightful book that I am truly thankful to have read. I don't know that I've expressed it clearly, but it truly helped me see that the things going on in my life were signs of depression - not grief. And I hadn't been able to discern between the two until reading this book. Not that she talks very much about grief, but it wasn't really needed, at least for me. I needed to know what the sign/symptoms were and what the suggested steps were for moving out of that.
This is a book that I plan to pass along to many people.

This book was fairly easy to read and intresting, although, I did get a little confused here and there as to what the author was trying to get across. Overall it was very uplifting. But, if you have suffered from depression for a long time as I have and don't have alot of outside help in the way of friends, you may be frustrated at how short her duration of depression was and how easily she overcame it. Not everyone is so fortunate to have friends that will show unconditional support , make us tea and give us a massage.

I found this book to be helpful because Ms. Moore herself has experienced the pain and frustration of depression. All the other books I've read on depression were written by doctors who were presenting it from a medical or psychological sense. She avoids touching on the medical aspects (the word "serotonin" appears once) and focuses primarily on the changes she made in her life to help her recover from depression. She also helps the reader understand the importance of supporting and helping a depressed loved one, and she provides instruction on how to effectively do that. My husband is reading this book now to try to understand how I feel and what I'm going through, and he says he's finally "getting it." The one thing that really clicked with me in the book was when she talked about how hard it was to read her Bible and learn new things while she was depressed. So, she said she focused on Biblical truths and basics -- in other words, she clung to what she knew to be true. That just makes so much sense, and I'm so glad she brought that idea forth.