An unexpected byproduct of a visit to see friends this past weekend in New Britain, Conn., was reading the Sunday Hartford Courant.

Inside their lifestyle section was one of the best obituaries I’ve read in a year. It was about a 69-year-old woman, Marina Berzins, who came to the U.S. as a teenager after escaping her native Latvia during World War II, along with her mother and older sister, to find refuge in a string of displaced-persons camps run by the United Nations in the American sector of Germany. Her father, a lieutenant colonel in the Latvian army, had been arrested and sent to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia.

“Being a child, it was absolutely fantastic,” Marina’s sister is quoted saying in the article, referring to their life moving from camp to camp, where families lived together in large ramshackle barracks rooms separated only by hanging blankets and with walls so poorly constructed snow would drift through. “It was a great life, but not for adults.”

Childhood memories from this period included “playing in the woods, gathering berries and mushrooms and (attending) classes taught by refugee teachers,” says the article. “There were piano lessons on one out-of-tune piano, occasional ballet lessons, scout troops. Food was often scarce (and egg was a great treat), and camp residents used to barter cigarettes and chocolate from the aid packages for scarcer goods.”

In talking about arriving in America with little money or education, and no ability to speak English, Marina’s sister noted, “When you are children, things are not hard to adjust, but for the older people it was much harder.”

Marina’s son, an artist, recalled how his mother always considered herself fortunate: “She tried to reinforce how lucky we were to live in a country like the United States.”

Marina’s daughter, a software engineer at MIT, testified, “She instilled in me a sense of the importance of education. You can make your own destiny if you work hard. Knowing how difficult her life was, there was always a sense that things could be turned around.”

A longtime friend of Marina’s said of her, “She was the ultimate optimist. Nothing bad ever happened. She was fun to be with, and people liked to be around her.”

Unbelievably, Marina met her second husband in a chance encounter at the local mall, in the 1980s, when he instantly remembered her face from the U.N. camps of her war upbringing.

“She ran into Evarists Berzins, a Latvian whom she had first known in one of the camps where she had spent her youth,” reports the article. “He had once given her a ride on his bicycle handlebars and had never forgotten her smile, her self-confidence and her beauty. He called her by her nickname, Marite.”

Whenever I read stories like this, it reminds me how ridiculous my bouts of self-pity are.

Obviously, everything is your perception of reality, and if you’re focused on what you have to be thankful for, and see the good in every situation, your mood will stay up. It’s that simple.

Recently, I’ve been listening to a series of studies on depression that my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.) gave in the late ’90s. Depression, as Jordan points out, is one of the most insidious problems in America today and it’s only supposed to get worse, according to studies.

Of course, Jordan says the common theme that runs through all forms of depression is self-pity.

“I don’t care what it is, where it came from, or how it’s induced, depression always has an element of self-pity in it,” he says. “You know, your emotions have no intellect; no thinking capacity of their own. They’re going to respond to what you’re thinking as if that’s really what’s happening, and there’s a formula for depression that’s as accurate and as consistent as anything in algebra or geometry, and it starts with bad, erroneous thinking.

“When the problem, the injury, or the insult comes, and they do come, you respond with disappointment. And if you take an injury, insult, or rejection, plus anger, multiplied by self-pity, you’ll get depression every time without exception. You’re on road. It will first be despair, and then it’ll be depression.

“And as long as you’re thinking about it, brooding about it, remembering to remember it—remembering to be hurt, angry, insulted and rejected—you get blinded by self-pity, and you’re blinded to the resources God has provided for you. And the difficulties you face get to be overwhelmingly large, and it becomes like the (refrain) from Hee-Haw: ‘Gloom, despair and agony on me. Deep, dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. Gloom, despair and agony on me.”

Unrealistic expectations and misplaced dependencies, Jordan says, represent the antithesis of grace.

Realistic thinking is to understand where you are in the program of God, who you are, and just what is meant by the grace of God—to live in the reality of God’s grace to you in Christ, and to have grace thinking dominate your life instead of the unrealistic thinking of a performance system.

“When you don’t have grace thinking, and you have unrealistic expectations, you’re not really thinking about what God’s really doing; you’ve just got ideas of your own,” says Jordan. “And you have misplaced dependencies. You’re trusting your sufficiency or someone else’s; you’re walking in unbelief.

“Life’s a lot tougher in its reality than most evangelicals and the Charismatics want you to believe it is. If you think you’re just going to thank God for all the (troublesome) things in your life, you’re nuts. I’m sorry. God never told you to be grateful for all those things that come into your life. He says in them, in all things, give thanks. How do you do that? You look away from yourself to who God’s made you in Christ.”

Whatever you depend on to give you purpose and meaning and life, that’s what’s going to control you, says Jordan.

“Really the only real sin that you constantly have to deal with is the sin of unbelief,” he explains. “The sin of not trusting the sufficiency God has given you in Christ. All the other things—all the sins of the flesh Paul names— adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings—all of those are really symptoms of your lack of faith in the sufficiency of who God’s made you in Christ.

“The way you cure depression is not by focusing on the symptoms, it’s focusing on the source. The battle’s in your mind, first and foremost.”

Imaginations are designed to be programmed by our conscious mind and it’s the things in our imagination that effect our emotions.

“The devil doesn’t program them, you program them,” says Jordan. “Or you allow them to be programmed by the intake your mind is having. They can be re-programmed, re-directed by your conscious thinking. So you cast down all this uncontrolled involuntary thinking that comes into your mind. Cast it down, ‘bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.’

“The way you re-program your imagination is through the conscious application of sound doctrine. That’s the objective of sound doctrine. And that’s the only way you’re going to control what Paul calls our ‘vain imagination.’ ‘Vain’ means empty, useless thinking. Not based on truth, but based on error.”

As Jordan explains by analogy, the radio has FM and AM dial and we can choose which band we’re going to listen to:

“The one band is error, and it says, ‘Worry and worry early.’ God says, ‘Be careful for nothing.’ Don’t be anxious or worried about anything. Which station do you listen to? Truth or error? God says He’s perfected forever all those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus. How are you going to get any better than that? You’re complete in Christ, ‘blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places.’ This is who God’s made you.

“Which are you gonna believe? You say, ‘But look at what I’ve done,’ and God says, ‘Yeah, I know, look at what I did.’

“Where are you looking? What station are you listening to? He says, ‘Reckon yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God.’ ”

Bottom line, godliness with contentment is where it’s at. As Paul says, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

“You can’t worry and trust God at the same time,” says Jordan. “So when you’re worrying, you’re not trusting God. It’s impossible to be depressed and thankful at the same time. All you need to get out of depression is to be thankful.

“Understand that neither height, nor depth, or anything can separate you from the love of God and say, ‘I’m going to be thankful to God, in whatever happens, for who I am in Him.’ You bring those thoughts into captivity to the reality of truth, and that’s a depression-buster. The path to freedom is first you decide you want to be free.”

In closing one of his depression studies, Jordan told an inspirational story of a blind teen-aged girl’s testimony once at a Bible youth camp he led.

He said of her, “She’d been blind from birth. Had never seen the light of day. She’d heard the gospel and gotten saved. The last day of youth camp, we were having a camp fire, and all the teens were giving testimony for what they thanked God for.

“One was thanking Him for the trees, and for getting him up that morning, and all that stuff, and somebody was thanking God for this and that, and this young girl got up and said, ‘You know, I want to thank God.’

“And everybody was looking at her, thinking, ‘What could this blind girl be thanking God for?’ Blind from birth and has to live all of life blind to all around her. And she said, ‘I’ve been listening all week, and I’ve learned about how much God loves me. I’ve learned what He’s done for me in Christ, and what a wonderful future He’s assured me, and how He’s equipped me right now to live a resurrected life in its details.’

And she added, ‘You know, I thank God I was born blind. Because that means I have virgin eyes. The first thing I’ll ever see is the one who loved me and gave Himself for me.’

“And when I heard that story, I thought, ‘You know, there’s a girl who’s got it!’ She’s so filled with the love and grace of God that self-pity is turned to thanksgiving, turned to joy unto a peace that passeth all understanding. That’s how you have victory every day.”