Lift up my head

Recently, while in a quiet moment perusing Psalms, I read a verse that really stuck with me. The Lord has been described in so many beautiful, grand ways: he’s the Prince of Peace, the Good Shepherd, the Redeemer. He performs massive and marvelous miracles. But in Psalms 3:3, David describes the Lord as “a shield for me, my glory and the lifter up of mine head.”

I remember a time when the Lord was literally the lifter up of my head. I gave birth to my fourth child, Asher, in November of 2019. After his birth I fell into a dark state of anxiety and depression. Nasty, unbidden thoughts rose to my mind and my overwhelming desire was to sleep until I could wake up and feel like the sky wasn’t falling anymore.

Though I’d experienced it to varying degrees three times before, this time, I was lucky. I had a caring and astute midwife who saw in me the signs of serious post-partum depression that I had previously dismissed as “baby blues.” With her help, I began to do all I could to push back on the darkness.

I worked with my family doctor and got a prescription for anti-depressants. I called a Jewish Family Services center and was connected to a mother’s assistant who visited me every week and assisted me with whatever I needed.

I am an extrovert, with a high social need, so I worked to build up a group of friends and support—we had recently moved to Boston and I didn’t know many people there. I joined a mom’s playgroup that met twice a month. I started a weekly Bible discussion group at my home. I joined a gym, with a daycare, and started going to group fitness classes.

Slowly, the darkness began to recede. With the help of many of God’s angels on Earth, I was painstaking clearing my mind of the intrusive, self-harmful thoughts that clouded it.

Then came March, 2020.

Within a matter of hours, the defenses I’d gathered against my depression evaporated. For a second, I felt completely alone on the battlefield, staring down my depression clutching only my bottle of pills…until I realized that I was expected to fight this battle while constantly surrounded by all four of my children, who were now denied human interaction from anyone but me, and while managing “at-home learning” and trying to maintain a home environment that suddenly doubled as an office space for my husband. If I had felt despair in November, it was nothing compared to the hopelessness I experienced in March.

Before March, the Lord answered my prayers by helping me do all I could for myself, and providing others I could lean on. After March, I was forced to rely solely on God to get me through.

He became the lifter of my head, helping me get out of bed in the morning when I knew there was nothing on my schedule to look forward to that day. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I don’t know if I would have survived that time in my life without the Lord’s invisible angels, bearing me up to fight against the voices in my head that told me I was worthless.

That’s not to say that the Lord ended the pandemic, made my children miraculously well-behaved and obedient, or banished my post-partum depression with a grand sweep of his hand. The pandemic shut-down months of 2020 are a murky nightmare in my memory, each sad and boring day sliding into the next with no relief in sight. Slowly, eventually, the world began to open up and I began to get back into the driver’s seat of my life.

A leader of my church, Amy A. Wright, recently said, “Our focus should be less about the way in which we are delivered and more about the Deliverer Himself. Our emphasis should always be on Jesus Christ!”

I have learned personally, and can testify, that the Lord can and will deliver us from our trials. He will do for you what you feel you should be able to do for yourself, even if that means lifting your head from your pillow to get through another day. We cannot accomplish all that we need to alone, but as Paul said in Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

Rachel Kenley Fry is stay-at-home Mom to four, soon to be five, awesome and exhausting children. She is book worm, a former journalist and current writer of short stories, lover of the outdoors and a born and bred Alaskan, happy to be home for good! She is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.