Testimony by Brian Mustain

A Healing Story

Although God has healed me instantly on several occasions over the years, the first time was the one that had the most profound effect on my life. I had just met Jesus in the fall of my junior year of college. My background: I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family, and had been in deep, black depression since I was perhaps ten years old. My principle activities were taking long walks by myself very late at night, feeling very sorry for myself (the immediate occasion was almost always unrequited love, which I had experienced without interruption since the third grade); and writing romantic/self-pitying poetry.

Even though I had come to know the love and reality of Jesus in a very deep way a couple of weeks before, I nevertheless continued to live in the morass of this deep depression, and one night I was out on my usual late, lonely walk—except that, in the midst of my despondency, I occasionally prayed. For the first time in my life, I "heard" the inaudible but gracious voice of the Father in my head, and these were the words he spoke: "Would you like to be free from depression?"

Even though I had no previous experience of this kind, I immediately took this to be the voice of God, and I instantly responded, "Yes!"

The voice returned with an unexpected question: "Are you sure? Think about it."

So I pondered the idea of being free from depression, and to my amazement found the idea to be highly threatening. Who would I be? My entire identity was bound up in being the lonely, depressed romantic—I had no idea how to be anyone else! If I didn’t have that, I would be in a frightening, unknown world. For about half an hour I walked in the darkness, considering the ramifications of being free from depression. But eventually I realized that, no matter what another life might look like and no matter how scary it might be, nothing could be worse than what I’d been living for ten years. So I said, "Yes!" Instantly, within about a second, I felt a kind of spiritual whoosh as if a mass of darkness was being sucked out of my very being. And I was free. That’s all. The depression was gone, the darkness was gone. That was 42 years ago, and I haven’t been depressed a minute since then (except for a time of a few hours when I was literally bearing another person’s pain for him—but that’s another story).

God is gracious!

Brian Mustain