Quotes from Edward Welch

When you erode the fear of death with the knowledge that you already died [in Christ], you will find yourself moving toward a simple, bold obedience.

Part of the depressive syndrome is that you are immensely loyal to your interpretation of yourself and your world. If God says you are forgiven in Christ, you create new rules that mandate contrition, penance, and self-loathing. If God says he loves you, you insist it is impossible. There it is: your system is higher than God's.

It is as if we want to believe the lie. Perhaps we blame ourselves because in a strange way it helps us feel as if we have more control. If we are responsible for whatever went wrong, for whatever hurt us, we might be able to figure out how to keep it from happening again.

Our goal is to love people more than need them. We are overflowing pitchers, not leaky cups.

Joy is not the opposite of depression. It is deeper than depression. Therefore, you can experience both. Depression is the relentless rain. Joy is the rock. Whether depression is present or not, you can stand on joy.

Depression ... involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part ... to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.

The reason Scripture doesn't give clear guidelines for assigning responsibility is that it is not essential for us to know precise causes. This is good news: you don't have to know the exact cause of suffering in order to find hope and comfort.

Fear of man is always part of a triad that includes unbelief and disobedience.

Your future includes manna. It will come. There is no sense devising future scenarios now because God will do more than you anticipate.

Shame is the deep sense that you are unacceptable because of something you did, something done to you, or something associated with you. You feel exposed and humiliated. Or, to strengthen the language, You are disgraced because you acted less than human, you were treated as if you were less than human, or you were associated with something less than human, and there are witnesses.

Love breaks the hold of individualism; it builds new communities out of the ashes of broken and fragmented relationships.

When happy, we possess something we love; when anxious, something we love is at risk; when despondent, something we love has been lost; when angry, something we love is being stolen or kept from us.