Heather Lenox
Position: Content Development Specialist
Spotted: Wrangling my kids, making people smile, noticing God in the small things, and Enneagram 4ing all over the place.
Experience: On missionary staff since May 2022
In His Own Words: How have you handled many major challenges or difficult times in your life and what did it teach you?
Heather started by sharing that some of the major challenges and difficult times that she’s had can really be boiled down to two words: depression and despair. “I’ve wrestled with depression, eating disorder, chronic pain, health issues without answers, the usual stuff that lots of people wrestle with, like deaths of loved ones and things like that. And, I think that the Lord’s been really faithful to give me some tools to cope with those things.”
Heather was in her late teens and early 20s when she first began to truly wrestle with depression, self-hatred, and hopelessness. “When I was in the midst of that struggle was when 9/11 happened and I happened to be in the nurse’s office at my college getting dismissed from school for a struggle with depression. As the twin towers fell, it felt like this symbolic thing that the world was a horrible place and it’s not worth it.”
The incredible part is that the story doesn’t end there. “The Lord was faithful at that time to bring a ministry into my life that gave me tools to walk forward; not making depression and my struggles with mental health my identity. At that point in time, it was easy for me to turn it on myself, to think I’m horrible, the world is horrible and there’s not hope. That’s when I feel like God handed me a life preserver, here’s hope and here’s how you hang on to it.”
What are some tools that helped you get through these difficult seasons?
As a foundation for these tools, Heather said, “The world will try to give you self-affirmation and cliche sayings and things to repeat over yourself. But we, because we have scripture, have an actual on paper litmus test for what’s true.”
- Identify the lies. “If you can identify the lies that you’re believing about yourself, about the world, about God, and about other people. Then find the scriptures that directly counteract those lies and spend time actively replacing the lies with the truth. It’s a really powerful way to renew your mind out of those dark spaces and into light. Truth, by staying rooted in the word is really important. Seeking the Lord and finding specific scriptures that he wants to speak over me in those situations to counteract the lies that I’m believing.” Some passages in Scripture she has gone back to continually are Psalm 40, Romans 12:1-2, Psalm 107, and Ephesians 6.
- Strong Christian community. Find people that can speak truth into your life. “Sometimes when we’re at those weak and vulnerable places, we can get so caught up in our emotions that it’s even hard to remember scripture or read scripture. So, if we have people around us that are ambassadors of truth that know you and can speak truth to you in those dark situations, that’s really powerful too.”
- Worship. “I think about Jehoshaphat in Scripture and how the Lord instructed him to send the song leaders and the musicians ahead of the army to fight the battle for him. I always think about that when I think of worship and how important it is that we speak to our spirit through music that directly speaks truth; truth to ourselves and worshipping the Lord because the enemy hates worship and wants everything to be about him. And so, when we’re worshipping God, we’re directly slapping him in the face and saying, no, you’re not taking me down.”
- Getting outside in nature. “It reminds you that the world is bigger than you. It’s really easy in dark times to doom scroll on social media or news stories, but getting out into nature, reminding yourself of what’s good and what’s true and that the world is bigger than what you’re seeing on your TV screen or on your phone. [It is]
- Take care of your physical body. “A lot of times our emotions are impacted by things in our physical bodies, so eating well, movement, getting sunshine, taking baths and showers, things that we tend to put to the wayside when we’re going through a hard time. They have to be the first things that we do so that our minds will operate right so that we can deal with our spirit.”
In closing, Heather shared some sentiments on how when all else fails, the truth she clings to is the work that God is doing and has done. “I have to trust in what God’s done in the past. For other people as well as for myself, because sometimes it’s a whole different situation that I’ve never encountered before. So, I must look back at the people in Scripture and how God rescued them. Then everything else takes faith, all of the things that we haven’t seen yet, like hope for heaven and hope for eternal life. Those things take faith. [Sometimes] I think it’s just getting to a point of desperation and realizing that at the end of everything else that you try, this is what’s left, having faith that that is what will carry you through because it has for other people, it has for you in the past.”
