If there is one thing that depression teaches, it is reliance on prayer. Prayer support is important in any case, but it is even more vitally so when a wave of depression swamps over your head.
One of the problems I have when I have depression is that my thoughts fire too rapidly. This makes it extremely difficult to focus, and as a result it makes prayer disjointed too. Thankfully, I have found a way to get through this.
The trick is to pray out loud or to write prayers out. Doing both of those forces your mind to concentrate enough that you can stay focused, at least for me. And I think I’ve figured out why it works that way.
When I think normally, it’s in complete sentences. Most of the time, I think through what I’m going to say before I say it out loud, or I see something and think, “Wow, that’s cool” or perhaps I taste something and say, “Ooh, I wish I didn’t have to swallow this.” Each of those sentences has a beginning and an end to the sentence.
Let’s take a simple sentence: “I saw the ball.” If someone is playing this out loud for you on a tape recorder and they pause in the middle, you don’t know what the ending is. “I saw the….” Saw the what? We don’t know. But the information is already on the tape. All we’d have to do is get to it.
The sentence is intended to be understood as a whole. That is, no one intends for only the first half of a sentence to be spoken and the rest left unsaid. So the choosing of the first words in the sentence is intentional. The first words are leading you to the last words. Because of that, it is sometimes possible to guess the end of someone’s sentence before they speak it, due to the context of the situation.
When we think, it’s similar to that. Our thoughts are not intended to be incomplete sentence fragments. When we think, “I see the ball” we start with the subject and proceed to the predicate, like in normal English. But here’s the thing. In order for the first part of the sentence to make sense, we have to know what the ending of the sentence is going to be before we actually think to the end of the sentence.
What this means is that your entire thought is known before you express that thought in words. You must already know the subject and the predicate before you even begin the thought. This knowledge isn’t expressible by us until it is translated into language, but it is nonetheless still existant.
And because of that, when your mind is really firing on all cylinders (or at least for me this is what happens), then I actually do not think in complete sentences but only in the first portion of each sentence. So if I’m thinking, “I hope I get to sleep soon” I might consciously only think “I hope I” and then change to the next subject, while leaving the implied “get to sleep soon” unstated mentally, because I already know it in order to begin the sentence.
I think it might actually be possible to think so quickly that your thoughts are never translated into words but you still know what you’re thinking. The only drawback to all this is that it means there is no conscious “filter” that is forcing your thoughts onto one specific point, and because there’s no filter it means that you will be unfocused. So if you try to pray in this manner, you might begin like this: “Lord, I pray that tonight you man I wish that this wasn’t what would happen I can’t believe that stupid call” and suddenly you’re thinking about last night’s hockey game instead of praying.
If instead of that, you force yourself to speak the prayer out loud (or write it down) then your mind is “required” to finish the sentence. You are speaking it out, and you need for your spoken language to make sense too. Thus, your thinking “slows” and you transform it into English with the ability to focus clearly on what you’re praying about.
Perhaps it may be that I am the only person who thinks in this manner, but I would find that unlikely (perhaps you just never realized you think that way because no one pointed it out to you).
