Last week at the Puritan Reformed Seminary annual conference, I spoke on the unity and diversity of the church. You can hear the audio and view the video here.

This message was prepared pre-Ferguson, but I hope that it helps the church to further think through our longer-term response to these issues. The section on diversity begins at 17 minutes. I’ve also found Ed Stetzer’s It’s Time To Listen series extremely helpful this past week.

The rest of the conference messages can be found here

I especially commend Pastor Conrad Mbewe’s addresses here and here.

I was contacted by a Christian friend who has a lifetime of personal experience with depression. After years of counsel and medical intervention, one doctor suggested Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) as a treatment option. This person graciously agreed to share their story so that other Christians struggling with depression or wrestling with treatment options may be encouraged. Here’s their story:

I have struggled through several episodes of major depression in my thirty-three years of life, but this one was beyond bad. It started in a manner that was not atypical from earlier episodes, with one major exception: I was already taking an anti-depressant medication and had been doing so for several years.

It was initially my assumption that, because I was already treating depression physically, it might be a mental or spiritual struggle. A trusted friend encouraged me to talk to a Christian counselor, and drove me to a few dreaded appointments where I hoped and prayed that the Lord would reveal fresh insight and draw me into joy as I celebrated Jesus’s love for me. But none of that happened. While the counselor reinforced that my pain was real, it didn’t go away despite my pleas to God.

From Bad to Worse
Several draining weeks later I returned to my physician, who is also a believer, and he explained that the benefits of some anti-depressants tend to dwindle after a few years. He therefore suggested that we try a new medication. I had been in emotional anguish for about three months at this point, but was hopeful that the new medication would do the trick. But instead, things worsened. And worsened. And then, when they couldn’t possibly worsen any more, they worsened. For the first time, I was truly suicidal. I wanted to die, and death seemed like the best solution since I still trusted in the strength of God’s plan of salvation for sinners like me. I could no longer read or even pray. I did still manage to go to work, but curled up in a ball sobbing my eyes out for the rest of the day.

My physician referred me to a psychiatrist, and that deflated me even more. In my mind, a psych referral confirmed that I was a crazy person. I stayed in survival mode for a couple of months, but suddenly reached a breaking point. The intensity of my anguish seemed to multiply exponentially, and for the first time my work was truly hampered by my inability to stop crying. I sobbed on the phone with my psychiatrist one night, and informed her that I could no longer take the pain and was willing to try one of the next means of treatment for stubborn depression: ECT or TMS.

“Shock Therapy” or TMS?
ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, has been used to treat depression for decades. There is a stigma attached to “shock therapy,” but when used by caring doctors, it has been proven to be very effective. However, there are a number of side effects to ECT, including a loss of short-term memory. Since I felt like my good memory was one of about two things going for me in life, I wasn’t excited about this option.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) was approved by the FDA in 2008 as a promising, non-invasive treatment for people suffering from major depression. It uses electromagnetic pulses to stimulate a part of the brain that is less active in people who have depression, and it has very limited side effects compared to ECT.

After visiting the TMS center at a local hospital and receiving insurance approval, the same thoughtful friend who drove me to the counselor a year earlier now drove me to my initial TMS treatment as a show of support. I sat in a chair with a helmet strapped to my head that looks like one of those hair dryers in a salon that old ladies sit under while reading magazines. I was able to watch TV during the treatments, which involved around a twenty-second electromagnetic pulse followed by around a thirty-second rest period. The pulse was uncomfortable, but bearable since I obviously survived. Some people compared it to an angry woodpecker on your head…I compared mine to an angry woodpecker operating a jackhammer.

I went to TMS treatments for five days per week (you can miss an odd day or two) for a total of thirty-six treatments. The doctor said that most people start to experience improvement after about fifteen days of treatment. It was while driving home from treatment #17 when I had a subtle realization that I no longer wished to curl up in a corner and die, and this was huge!

Darkness Lifted
The improvements thankfully continued, and the darkness of that long season has finally lifted. While the long-term benefits of TMS treatments are somewhat unknown since this is such a new procedure, I’m still thankful to the Lord for allowing these medical advances in tackling depression and am just so grateful for the relief that it has provided. And I pray that those electromagnetic pulses would help give other depression sufferers a new pulse in life as well.

My high school years were pretty disastrous – not just academically but morally and spiritually too. As I look back, I take a large part of the blame for that; I made so many wrong and foolish decisions about friends, money, relationships, media, and entertainment. I ended up leaving school one year early, and it wasn’t until my early twenties, after I was converted, that education became so important to me. A late starter, you might say.

However, I believe I can honestly say that the education system was partly to blame for my 12 year educational wilderness – with one or two exceptions, the subjects, the teachers, and the style of teaching were just so utterly boring and totally impractical.

When I look back, I can hardly believe what we wasted our time upon:

• English books that seemed to have been chosen for maximum profanity and obscurity
• Math teachers waffling on about weird things like sine, cos, and tan but nothing about money and personal finance
• History courses that delved deep into a couple of insignificant events (Skara Brae anyone) but didn’t touch either of the Great Wars and gave no sense at all of an overall timeline of history.
• Geography that studied the clouds and river bends but left us without a clue about where different countries (even our own) were located on the globe.
• Science that was big on dry theory and tiny on the wonder of the world on the micro or macro levels.
• Music classes where the most music we were allowed to make was with a triangle.

But what annoys me even more than what we did spend time on is what we DIDN’T spend time on. I spent thousands of hours in school and yet never learned:

Personal finance: Not even the basics of saving, mortgages, budgeting, life assurance, pensions, etc.

Time management: Not one lesson on how to plan a weekly calendar, or how to assign different work for different sized time blocks, or what times are best for what work, etc.

Organization: Filing, office management, To-do lists, and so on.

Study techniques: Not one lesson or note-taking or preparing for exams.

Public speaking: Never gave one speech in my whole school career. Never had any coaching on communication skills or making a presentation.

Reading: We were weighed down with plenty books but given no idea how to read efficiently and retentively.

Leadership: Taking initiative, delegation, mentoring, chairing meetings, were all completely untouched.

Conflict resolution: How to prevent conflicts, how to manage them, how to negotiate, how to compromise, how to confront wrong, how to reconcile? Not a clue on any of these.

Mental health: Nothing, absolutely nothing on danger signs to look out for in oneself and others, how to take preventative action, or how to recover from major crises, losses, and disappointments. I’d like to see CBT taught in every school.

Basic Housekeeping: Just the basics of how to paint, wire a plug, change a wheel, saw in a straight line, etc.

Personal Fitness: I stand in front of these machines in the gym and haven’t the first idea what to do with them. I’m still not sure I could tell you where my biceps are (or if I have any at all).

Teaching: How to teach!

When I left school, the cutting edge of technology was the Sinclair ZX81. I believe things have moved on a bit since then, making the world slightly more complicated. So today I’d also want multiple lessons on digital health.

I think things have improved somewhat in some schools over the years, but there are still huge gaps of basic practical living and vocational skills that no amount of algebra, physics, history, and psychology can make up for.

With all the inertia, vested interests, and stagnant thinking in the educational system, I know it will probably take another 40-50 years to see a more practical and useful curriculum containing some of these subjects. However, it would be great if our more passionate and innovative teachers would try to work some of these things into existing curricula.

You might end up with less people like me.

What subjects do you wish were taught at school? What subjects would you drop or reduce?