The Day I Told My Small Group I Was Depressed
I had been in the same small group for four years.
Eight people, Tuesday nights, rotating houses. We had prayed each other through a job loss, a miscarriage, a parent’s cancer, and a marriage that almost ended. We knew each other’s kids’ names and each other’s coffee orders. When I say we were close, I mean it.
So when the depression got bad enough that I could not hide it anymore, this was the group I told. Not my pastor. Not my family. These eight people, in a living room, on a Tuesday.
I had been rehearsing the words for weeks. I had them down to a sentence I could say without breaking. I would wait until the check-in portion of the evening, when we went around the circle. When it came to me, I would say, “I have been depressed for about four months. I am seeing a counselor. I am not okay.”
That was the plan.
What actually happened was different.
I started crying before I got to the sentence. Not the kind of crying you can stop. The kind that comes up from somewhere and takes over the whole body. I got three words out - “I have been” - and then I could not speak. I sat there with my hand over my mouth and shook for what felt like a full minute while eight people watched.
The leader of the group, a man named David, did not do what I expected. He did not say a verse. He did not say “the joy of the Lord is your strength.” He did not say “let us pray against the spirit of heaviness.” He said, “Take your time.” And then he said nothing else for a while.
The rest of the room stayed quiet. Someone got up and brought me water. Someone else moved their chair closer. I finished the sentence eventually. Then I told them the actual amount - four months, a counselor, medication consideration, the specific way mornings had become the hardest part of the day.
When I stopped talking, the room was quiet for a moment. And then the woman sitting next to me said something I have not forgotten.
“My sister went through this for two years,” she said. “I did not know what to do for her. I said a lot of the wrong things. I am glad you told us. I am not going to say the wrong things to you.”
That sentence did more for me than any prayer anyone could have prayed in that room. She was not pretending to have answers. She was telling me she was going to try not to make it worse.
Here is the part I did not expect.
Three of the eight people never really came back after that night.
Not immediately. Over the next few months, they stopped showing up. One stopped answering texts. One moved to a different church, which they said was about the music but which I suspect was about me. One, a man I had known for years and considered a friend, told me later that he “did not know how to be around it.”
I do not blame them. I did not know how to be around my own depression either, at first. Nobody had taught them what to do when someone in the group is not just having a hard week but actually sick. They did what most people do when they do not have the tools. They stepped back.
The other five stayed. Some of them stayed badly - one kept sending me verses I did not want, one kept asking if I had prayed about it, one told me about a supplement that had helped her cousin. But they stayed. They kept showing up. They kept asking. They kept being in the room.
What I have come to understand, and did not understand then, is that the people who stayed were not the people with the best theology of suffering. They were the people who knew they did not have a theology of suffering, and who showed up anyway.
I have talked to a lot of people since then who have told their small group or their church that they were depressed. The stories are not all the same. Some people were met with compassion. Some were met with cliches. Some were told that depression is a spiritual issue and that if they were praying enough and reading the Word enough, they would not be depressed. Some were told nothing, because nobody said anything.
The ones who were met with compassion were not necessarily in the most theologically sound churches. They were in rooms where the specific people in those rooms had decided to take the person seriously.
I am still in that group.
It is smaller than it was. David still leads. The woman who said the thing about her sister is still sitting next to me on Tuesdays. Two of the people who left came back after a year or two, and one of them told me privately that he did not know how to handle it at the time and he was sorry.
I am not writing this to tell you to tell your small group. I am not writing this to tell you to keep it to yourself either. I am writing this because when I was at the bottom of it, I looked for stories of people who had done this, and the stories I found were either testimonies of instant healing or warnings that it would ruin your church relationships.
What I did not find was what actually happened. Which is that it was messy. Some people left. Some stayed. Some said the wrong thing. One said the right thing. And four years later I am still in the room, still in the group, still a Christian, and still depressed some days and not others.
The story did not end with a healing. It ended with a Tuesday night and eight chairs and five of them still occupied by the same people.
That is what happened. That is what I have to offer.